With Selection Sunday now only three days away, it's time for a look at the logistics of narrowing down a nation of talented teams to the 65 invitations to the NCAA Tournament.
Although the meetings of the Selection Committee are always behind closed doors, it is well-known that they use a handful of metrics to weed out the Dancers from the NIT-bound. Despite the fact that one or two teams are snubbed each year (last year, they were Buffalo and Utah State), rest assured that there is some sort of method to the committee's madness.
Of the 65 bids, 31 are given to the champions of the various conferences, which the committee does not influence. All but one conference give out their automatic bids in their conference tournaments, which disregard teams' performances during the regular season and open the door for struggling teams to steal a bid. The Ivy League, in awarding its bid to the regular season champion and thus rewarding consistency, has shown that its smarts extend beyond the classroom.
The other 34 bids are the ones that keep the committee in the green room for hours.
One of the tools the committee uses is the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI). The RPI formula for a team is as follows: 0.25(Team Winning Percentage) + 0.5(Opponents' Average Winning Percentage) + 0.25(Opponents' Opponents' Winning Percentage). This metric gives the committee a uniform measure for all 334 Div.I teams.
In addition to RPI, the committee also uses Strength of Schedule (SOS), especially in non-conference contests. For many teams, SOS can be greatly altered by the non-conference opponents they play in any given year. All teams play their conference opponents once or twice per season as per league setup rules. However, the committee rewards teams that voluntarily play talented opponents outside of their respective conferences.
Although one team may have fewer wins than another, a more difficult schedule is taken into consideration and looked upon favorably by the committee. This partiality could hurt George Washington's seeding this season; despite its 26-1 record and having the best name in college hoops on its roster (Pops Mensa-Bonsu), the team's SOS does not rank among the top 200 in the nation.
Another important factor is a team's performance on the road and at neutral sites. A good team will be able to step up to the challenge of playing in front of an unsupportive rowdy crowd. This will come back to haunt some of the Big Ten teams - namely Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan State, which combine for an abysmal 17-24 mark on the road. Whether this record speaks to the strength of the Big Ten or to these specific teams' inability to win away from home will be up to the committee to decide. (I'd be tempted to say it is the latter.)
Teams are also evaluated not so much in how they start the season, but how they finish. This could prove to be beneficial for Texas A&M, which has reeled off seven straight wins, and Arkansas, which has a five-game win streak of its own. Syracuse, on the other hand, is doing everything in its power to discourage the committee, including a 17-point loss to Cincinnati and a 40 - that's right, FORTY - point loss to DePaul.
Finally, the committee looks at "quality wins" and "bad losses." A quality win is a victory over a team with a top-50 RPI, and similarly, a bad loss is one to a team outside the top-100 in the RPI.
These factors combine for the majority of the Big Dance selection criteria. Most of the 34 at-large bids are fairly obvious, with only four to eight being hotly debated by the committee.
