ncaa tournament part 2

About ten years ago I was laid up for a month. With nothing else to do, I spent the time watching every game of March Madness that was televised. I fell in love. This was basketball at its purest and finest. Not like the NBA where the rules only seemed to be whatever the officials decided they were on a given night. College players were expected to play by the rules, and the officiating was quite consistent. If a player got away with something, it was only because an official had missed it, and not because of who the player was, or how it might affect ratings.

Ever since then, I have always made it a point to watch as many games as I could each year, using vacation time on at least two occasions in order to be able to watch the finals.

Having said all that, I have always been amazed at the oddities the selection committee seems to come up with in regards to the scheduling of games. This year, both Utah and Arizona had to travel all the way to Miami to play against each other, and BYU and Texas A&M played each other in Philadelphia, among others.

So this year I decided to see for myself if it could be done better. First I searched the internet to see if I could find out exactly how the committee does its work. I found a rather detailed article in Wikipedia, which described the process pretty much as I thought it would be. Once the teams are selected, they are all placed in ranked order from 1-65, although exactly how they determine the ranking must be a state secret. The authors of the article seem stumped by it, as they point out how the committee so often snubs the Missouri Valley Conference when its teams are ranked in the top 40, and how Utah State was snubbed in 2004, despite being 25-2 and being ranked in the top 25.

The article goes on to describe how the top 4 teams get the number one seeds, the next four get number two seeds and so on. Then the highest number one seed is placed in the same region as the lowest number two seed (number eight ranked overall). By extrapolation, the teams with the following rankings would all be in the same region:
1,8,9,16,17,24,25,32,33,40,41,48,49,56,57,64. This is all exactly as I would have expected. The article then goes on the say that “adjustments” are made for a variety of reasons. Ah, Ha! A loophole! First, the top three teams in each conference must be placed in separate regions. This means that if the 1-65 ranking system would place the top two teams in a conference in the same region, one of the teams is reseeded and moved to another region. If a conference has more than three teams in the field, and two teams are in the same region, they will change the seeding so that they would not play each other until the regional final. This is not an absolute rule, if it contradicts another rule, but they will do it whenever possible. They will also change seeding to allow teams to play closer to home, if it does create too large a disparity in the expected performance of the regions. There are also other unnamed reasons the committee will change seeding.

In order to test this out, I needed to know what the 1-65 ranking was. I could not find this anywhere. I don’t know if it’s another state secret of the committee, or I just didn’t know where to look. So I tried to recreate it as best I could. It was not too difficult, actually. I knew that Louisville was #1 overall, so I could easily reconstruct that one. And I decided that Connecticut must be #4 overall, since they would play Louisville in the national semi-finals should both teams make it that far. The problem was not knowing who was #2 and who was #3 between Pittsburgh and North Carolina. I picked North Carolina as #2, but that was entirely arbitrary. If I was wrong, then half of the teams would have to be flip-flopped in my list, but all the flip-flops would only be one place change each, so it didn’t make a whole lot of difference. The biggest problem is that my list is actually a list of teams AFTER all the adjustments were made, not the original list.

To make a long story short, after I studied it from several different angles, and listed different possibilities, I discovered that, although I would have done things differently, for the most part, the brackets that the NCAA selection committee came up with cannot be said to be wrong. (Note how carefully I just worded that.) It’s just inevitable that some teams are going to have to travel a long way to play. I think the problem stems from having TWO first round sites way up in the northwest corner of the country when there are only a handful of teams within a thousand miles of there in the tournament. If they feel there must be two sites in the west, the it would have been better if one of them had been in, say, Utah, Colorado, Texas, or even Arizona. I realize the sites are chosen a long time ahead of time, but surely the NCAA has a general idea of the locations of most of the schools that are likely to be in the tournament. Only five of the top 16 teams in the field are located west of the Mississippi, and only two of those are west of the Rocky Mountains. In fact, in the entire 64 team field, only about a dozen teams are in the western third of the country.

I think the most important thing in bracketing is that the top 16 ranked teams be seeded properly so that if all 16 make it to the regionals, #1 would play #16 and so on. And just like in football, I think this seeding should be done using a set formula, not left to the “judgments” of people who may or may not have a vested interest in the outcome. Once that’s set, don’t make any adjustments. As far as the rest of the teams in the field, I think it makes little difference who plays who. If, in general, the lower seeded teams are playing the higher seeded teams, and the teams in the middle are playing each other, it shouldn’t make a whole lot of difference what their exact seeding is.

At first I was a bit upset at the fact that Cleveland State had to travel all the way to Miami to play, although I doubt the players considered that bad, and that Akron had to go all the way to Portland, Oregon to play. I figured it was just the usual “dissing” of anything Cleveland. But once I started making up my own brackets, I discovered that, because of their seeding, those were really the only two places they could have been assigned.

As noted above, two first round sites were up in the Pacific Northwest. Of the top 16 seeds, Washington and Gonzaga were assigned there, as being the closest top seeds. But that left two openings. As #2 seeds, Memphis and Oklahoma were allowed to play in Kansas City, so Kansas was sent to Minneapolis as the next closest place, and Missouri was shipped out west, probably because Kansas was ranked higher overall. It may seem a tad unfair that #3 Missouri had to travel while #4 Gonzaga got to play closer to home, but there just wasn’t anywhere else to put them. As far as the other western opening, it seems it would have to have been either Xavier or Wake Forest, and since Wake Forest was “needed” in Miami, Xavier got the call. Every other one of the top 16 did get to play closest to home. So it would seem that when all is said and done, I don’t have anything to really beef about, and there is not as much that I would change as I thought.

As for the two games I mentioned at the beginning? I would have sent Utah to Portland, and Illinois to Miami. I would have sent Arizona to Portland and Western Kentucky to Miami. I would have sent Texas A&M to Kansas City, and Maryland to Philadelphia. And I would have sent BYU to Kansas City and Clemson to Philadelphia.

ncaa tournament

Do the NCAA tournament brackets make sense to anybody? I mean, games played in Philadelphia as part of the West region, while games in Boise as part of the East region? Seven of the eight first round cities are in two different regions each. Minneapolis is the only city that is in only one region. Which means that Kansas and Michigan State were the only two teams in the entire second round that could scout their sweet 16 opponent. Then of course you had the oddity of the hated rivals Duke and North Carolina playing on the same court and on the same day, but in two different regions.

And of course, this says nothing at all about the absurd way in which teams are seeded and assigned, but that's a beef for another day.

Church Attendance

I just read a Cover Story article in USA Today which says that nearly all Christian denominations are losing ground. This caught my attention because I remembered reading an article in The Week recently which said that church attendance is up in the past year, and made the point that it is normal during economic downturns for people to start going back to church. When you actually read the USA Today article, you find that they are reporting on some study which compares denominational affiliations today with 19 years ago. The only reason I bring this up is because it seems to me that the editors of USA Today would have known about the fact of church attendance currently going up, and yet they chose to make this their lead story. Technically, the article was true, but it’s a great example of using the truth to deceive.

Mortgage Bailouts

So is it right to bail out people who cannot afford to pay their mortgages? One reporter denounces it, calling the defaulters “losers,” and saying that to do so just encourages bad behavior. Another says the government shouldn’t be bailing us out for stupid mistakes. About 92 percent of mortgage holders have paid their bills on time, and we get nothing. Another reporter says that the free market is already fixing the problem because first time home buyers are taking advantage of the big drop in home prices. “So let’s stop trying to prop up $500,000 mortgages taken out by fools earning $40,000 a year.” Of course, other reporters claim that it’s the banks and mortgage companies who are to blame for “pushing” unreasonable mortgages on people. And of course, others point out that it was the government which put pressure on these same companies to make mortgages to people who ultimately could not afford them.

A thought occurs to me that I have not heard anywhere else. A lot of the people who are losing their homes are people who could very well afford them at the time they took out the mortgage. They had good jobs, and bought a house which was within their means, with a good interest rate. But as the economy sank, they lost their jobs, and after going through their savings, they can no longer afford the payments. For these people, I have sympathy.

But for a great many people who are in trouble, there is no question that what they did was not only foolish, but totally irresponsible. I remember the ads from a few years ago. The promise of mortgage payments so low that anyone could afford them. Sure, the payments were not even high enough to cover the principal, but don’t worry about that, we’ll tack on some balloon payment in a few years, and surely by then, you’ll be making a lot more money, and the value of your house will be so much higher, that we’ll be able to work something out for you. I remember being tempted by these ads. The temptation lasted for all of three-tenths of a second, before I said, What are you, insane? What person in their right mind would ever fall for such a gimmick?

Do I think people who did this should be bailed out? Sorry, I just can’t see it. If there were some way to differentiate between the people who were honestly trying to live within their means, and the greedy ones who insisted on buying houses they could not possibly afford, then I would consider finding a way to help the former, just like we always try to help people who are victims of natural disasters. Other than that, I have to say that I feel very much resentment that my working hard to pay my bills gets me no farther than the irresponsible people who helped to create the mess we are in.