Nobody seems to want to be the fourth No. 1 seed. Tennessee’s stay on the top line of the Bracketology NCAA Tournament projected bracket was short. Arizona has moved up to the fourth overall seed after the Volunteers lost at Texas A&M on Saturday.
Also, Monday’s bracket features two bid stealers. Richmond and South Florida are in first place in their respective leagues, but would not be in the bracket otherwise. New Mexico and Cincinnati are the first two teams out because of that.
Bracketology top seeds
Check out Palm’s latest bracket, Bubble Watch and full field of 68 at the Bracketology hub.
Which numbers matter (and which ones don’t)
I am going to give you my annual primer on the NCAA Tournament selection process. I’ll go over what is considered and not considered and how important some of the data points are.
If you ask a committee member what they are looking at when selecting and seeding teams for the tournament, they often say they evaluate teams based on four questions:
Who did you play?Where did you play them?Who did you beat?Who beat you?
Note that “By how much?” is not one of the questions. The selection process is results oriented, even if some of the data supporting it is not.
For example, the NCAA’s own ranking system, the NET, is heavily influenced by margin of victory. However, the NET is not used to make decisions. They don’t use it to pick or seed one team over another. The NET’s only use is to put teams in quadrants on team sheets. So, the NET rankings of a team’s opponents are much more important than its own ranking.
Another ranking that is heavily reliant on margin of victory is KenPom.com. Ken Pomeroy’s rankings and other statistical analysis of teams and players is brilliant, however it is overly helpful in the selection and seeding process.
In fact, when the NCAA was starting to look at replacing the RPI back in 2017, Pomeroy told the NCAA…
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