What the NCAA Tournament Committee got Wrong: 2024 Edition
The NET reveals how the NCAA betrays its own criteria
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! A glorious weeks-long holiday celebrating our most chaotic sport. It’s a time devoid of forced decorum, or fighting against crowds (Or online product inventories) to get all the gifts. Cook as much or as none as you like! Sink into your sofa or sit so hard on the edge of your seat it leaves a mark. Oh wait, what’s that on the horizon…It’s the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee. You can lock your door, but they’ll find a way in to grinch themselves upon all your good vibes. Dr. Charles McClelland is now standing uncomfortably close over your shoulder, whispering flawed logic into your ear about how difficult and painstaking his job is.
You could take sympathy upon the committee for doing a relatively thankless job, but why would anyone do that? These are actively employed commissioners and athletic directors who already make absolute gobs of money at their day jobs. Day jobs that are at total odds with their ability to fairly seed the tournament. If a committee were creating a bracket for the best soda, would you want the CMO of Coca-Cola involved? Of course not, you’d want a pure, untainted field for all your favorite fizzy bubblies.
If you’ve followed any of my previous writing, you’ll know the major theme here is collegiate athletics’ struggle against the decision-making of individuals who carry immense bias. As humans we all carry a certain amount of bias, but I’d say that a work-interest conflict that could impact dollar-signs in the form of future media deals is pretty high up there on the scale of impact. This committee would never admit it in favor of grasping the money and power they possess, but there are much better, easier ways to do their job. The NET rank was a step in the right direction, but as we’ll see below it doesn’t appear that the NCAA is using their own tool.
This exercise is a pretty simple one. Take the NCAA’s own NET rank, average it with Ken Pomeroy’s AdjEM, and then do a snake style draft of placing the teams into their respective seeds. In the past I’d included the Sagarin ranks to further balance the model, but unfortunately it seems like those ranks are no longer being produced. Thankfully, there weren’t any seed-line ties requiring an additional tiebreaker this year. Diving right in…
The Objective Field
The NCAA got itself a fancy gold star sticker for every team they placed on the correct seed line. They got 32 of them! Now they can decorate their own special-guy football helmets. That feels great! Or, well, maybe just good for 47.06% accuracy overall. I’ll give credit where it’s due: This year just 6 teams were off by more than 2 seed lines. That’s a touch more accurate than the committee has been known for in my years of tracking this data. New Mexico feels the participant’s sting hardest, slipping to an 11-seed when they’re more deserving of their opponent’s 6-rank.
Major congratulations are in order for Texas A&M, Northwestern, Utah St., South Carolina, and Virginia. Each of these schools pulled the wool over the committee’s eyes and snuck into the party uninvited. They’re standing in a circle of dour malcontent in the corner of your living room, drinking your beverages, staring into your eyes, just daring you to do something about it. Thankfully at this version of the party, we can give ’em a much deserving boot and let in the much cooler, more talented, and objectively more entertaining crew of St. John’s, Villanova, Cincinnati, Wake, and Pitt.
After the hemming and hawing of the ACC Commissioner over other conferences somehow gaming the NET rank in their favor, I expected some undue ACC bias to go down (That also had to be one of the dumbest complaints I’ve ever heard in this sport, amongst a rich history). The tomfoolery happened, but definitely not the way I’d imagined. How did Virginia (#54 NET, #69) get in, while the much more deserving Wake and Pitt were kicked? The NCAA’s answers don’t fit here.
The Cavaliers missed the cut line by both metrics and they didn’t sparkle down the stretch, so a recency bias fails too. Their best road win is @ #34 Clemson. Their best overall win is against #31 Wake Forest. All 5 of the deserving teams left out have better road wins, at least as many Q1 wins, and less Q2 (Or 3!) losses. I guess Tony Bennett just smells nice? Even though the stink of once losing to a 16-seed probably still lingers… Speaking of 16, you’ll see 16 other teams that still missed this bracket (So, 21 total) before you get all the way down to Virginia’s actual rank. Amazing.
Up top, we saw the same strange ACC fumes lift North Carolina up to a 1-seed. The reality is that Arizona at the 2-seed is the strongest team in that region. Here, back in objective reality, we see that Auburn was the team actually worthy of the 4th 1-seed. I’ll once again give the committee some credit: They did pretty well with the top seeds, and the very bottom seeds. Of the lower-rungers, only Saint Peter’s scored higher than they deserved. I wouldn’t bet on another big run from them —while overseeded this year, the previous amazing edition should’ve been a 12- or even 11-seed.
The Conference Totals
The ACC made the news more for complaining, but what conference actually benefitted the most from the committee in 2024? Take a look at the multi-bid conferences:
- AAC: 2
- Atlantic 10: 2
- ACC: 5
- Big XII: 8
- Big East: 3
- Big Ten: 6
- Mountain West: 6
- PAC 12: 4
- SEC: 8
- WCC: 2
The Big XII got a record (For them) 8 teams into the field. It could have easily been more with 10 of their teams inside the top 50 of NET and AdjEM, plus a clear gap between that conferences’ average quality and everyone else. It would appear all that whining about the NET did have an impact. But what’s this? The SEC, the 4th best conference overall, also has 8 teams in the field? They do have 8 teams in the top 50 of AdjEM (7 in NET)... Now the NCAA committee’s silly-brain gymnastics are getting back to their usual high marks. The Mountain West hype train is rolling too. They do have 6 teams in the top 50s, yet none in the top 20. I’d consider that forgivable versus the SEC football juice that someone spiked our punch with.
Let’s revist these tallies objectively:
- AAC: 2
- Atlantic 10: 2
- ACC: 5
- Big XII: 9
- Big East: 5
- Big Ten: 5
- Mountain West: 5
- PAC 12: 4
- SEC: 6
- WCC: 2
As expected, the SEC loses 2 bids to a cold, hard reality check. The under-served Big East is the 2nd best conference in the country and its fans have just cause to be mad that only 3 of its teams were included — here we see that 5 of them were deserving. The ACC did end up getting the right amount of teams into the field but Wake and Pitt fans should remember this moment for revenge against Virginia next year. For doubters of conference superiority or rank, I’ll leave you with the average strengths of each conference, tracked throughout the entire season.
While the NCAA Committee gets a lot wrong, they did get almost half the field right. Tomorrow I’ll take a look at predictions for the real (If fallible) bracket and how these miscalculations might help you in filling out your brackets. I’ll also check back in on simulating this bracket, so we can find our own objective national champion and see if it mirrors what happens across the country these next few weeks.
Whoever you support and however you choose to celebrate, I hope you’ll be able to thoroughly enjoy the madness. With my own team relegated to the NIT (An even sloppier mess of a bracket), I’ll be rooting for chaos in full. It will be hard to top the sheer amount of parity and upsets from last year, but I look forward to seeing the field try.
