NCAA Selection Changes
Posted by: ronWhile we were busy celebrating Labor Day Weekend by being as lazy as we possibly could, Adam was busy putting together this article on the NCAA Selection Committee changes for the upcoming season.
As the article points out, the biggest changes involve trying to remove negative-impact wins and doomsday scenarios. Last year, conference winners automatically became “Teams Under Consideration” and had Bentley defeated Holy Cross, would’ve created havok in the pairwise. This is no longer the case. In addition, The RPI weighting has now changed taking a significant portion of the RPI that was based on winning percentage and moving it over to strength of schedule. The committee believes this will encourage a wider variety of non-conference games.
Is it just me or am I missing something? I don’t see top-tier teams scheduling Atlantic or CHA teams more because of this, I actually see them scheduling them less. Adam is busy writing a manifesto on these changes (as well as expousing the virtues of KRACH i’m sure,) which may shed more light on this. In the meantime, my immediate reaction is to chalk this one up to the rich getting richer.
September 5th, 2006 at 4:12 pm
Adding more weight to the strength of schedule should benefit some schools that are not so rich. It should benefit the “lesser” teams in the big conferences. Teams like Min. Duluth who played well against non-conference opponents, except against Vermont at the beginning. These games included a win against Maine and a tie against Cornell, both teams making the NCAA tournament and losing to eventual champ Wisc. So why shouldn’t a team like Duluth play in the tournament when its only flaw is to play teams like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Denver, North Dakota, and CC night in and night out, with a few breaks against teams like UAA, Mankato or Mich Tech, but as you can see the conference is stacked towards national championship contenders with the last 5 of them coming from this conference.