Is the NCAA Selection Committee Stupid or Corrupt? ¿Por Qué No Los Dos?

Zillionaire basketball coaches who have been fired for corruption even by a university not known for scrupulous ethics tend not to be at the top of Curmie’s heroes list.  Rick Pitino is one such creature.  But when he’s right, he’s right.

Pitino made headlines recently when he savaged the selection committee for the NCAA basketball tournament for not giving a bid to his St. John’s team.  He then refused an invitation to the less prestigious NIT tournament.  Thing is, there is no conceivable way the Red Storm should have been omitted from the “Big Dance.”

Readers who know Curmie personally are familiar with his “Totally Objective But Not Necessarily Accurate” rankings.  Of course, these rankings have proven to be rather accurate, indeed.  This year, they predicted outcomes considerably better than did either the AP or Coaches’ polls.  Curmie has had a bracket in the top 10% nationally (on the ESPN site) several years in a row, and was in the top 1/10 of 1% a couple of years ago. 

The most respected national ranking system is Ken Pomeroy’s KenPom.com.  Other rankings are the BPI (Basketball Power Index) and NET (NCAA Evaluation Tool).  All of these systems are based on objective criteria: the location of the game, the outcome, the quality of the opponent.

All told, then, there are five different ranking systems Curmie is referencing here (his own system has both a “right now” ranking and a “for the season” ranking).  Curmie would have St. John’s as a 5-seed in the “right now” rankings, as an 8-seed for the season.  KenPom would have them as an 8, the BPI as a 6.  Even the massively problematic NET, which Pitino blames for the snub, would have the Red Storm as an 8-seed.  In other words, literally every statistically-based system has St. John’s not merely in the tournament, but comfortably so: they’re no lower that 32nd in any of these rankings; the top 42 are in.

Indeed, St. John’s ranked higher than no fewer than seven teams receiving at-large bids—Clemson, Florida Atlantic, Nevada, South Carolina, Texas A&M, Utah State, and Virginia—in all five categories!  There were a couple others that barely edged out the Red Storm in a single system.

Of course, Florida Atlantic was last year’s Cinderella team, so they get in; South Carolina was picked to be near the bottom of the SEC and their great start made them (for a while) a successful underdog (and their women’s team is really good), and Clemson and Virginia are from the ACC, which always gets preferential treatment.  Usually, it’s Duke; this year, the Blue Devils’ 4-seed is about right. 

It’s apparently North Carolina’s turn to be absurdly over-rated.  Curmie had them as a 3-seed for the season; KenPom and the BPI agree.  The NET and Curmie’s “right now” ranking have them as the last 2-seed.  Who should be the last 1-seed may be up for discussion—Arizona, Auburn, Iowa State, and Tennessee all have a reasonable claim—but it sure as hell isn’t the Tarheels.  What’s worse, they also get a first-round play-in game (overall #1 UConn doesn’t), and they have by far the easiest bracket. 

In Curmie’s “right now” ranking, UConn and Iowa State are the top two teams in the country; they’re in the same quadrant, so only one can make the Final Four.  Meanwhile, UNC is #8, and can get to Glendale without having to beat anyone better than #12 Arizona.  (All four other systems, including Curmie’s ranking for the season, have Arizona ranked higher than North Carolina, so there’s that…)

None of this, of course, means that those teams Curmie is calling over-rated won’t win some games, or even the tournament, but seedings should reflect the past and the present.  There are a lot of teams that don’t belong at all, and St. John’s has plenty of company in feeling… erm… screwed.  Ken Pomeroy has seven teams that didn’t make the tournament ranked higher than South Carolina.

There is always, of course, some controversy surrounding Selection Sunday.  This year seems worse than most.  Curmie can’t recall a year when a team that all of those ranking systems agree should be an 8-seed or higher can’t even get a play-in game as a 10, or one in which a 1-seed wasn’t ranked higher than 8^th in any of those systems, while two other teams from that same conference got bids (or at least seeds) they didn’t deserve.  Curmie’s old, though… maybe he’s forgetting something.

As for the former: maybe Pitino is being punished for past transgressions? Or he stole someone’s girlfriend?  Or committee members are dumber than the proverbial sack of hammers? 

As for the latter: It is true that once upon a time, the ACC was the best college basketball conference in the country.  It is also true that bell-bottom jeans were once considered stylish.  Today, the only plausible explanation for the over-ranking of teams from the fifth-best conference is that the ACC Commissioner has compromising photographs of committee members and barnyard animals.

2nd Annual Fulminations of the Season

It’s mid-March again, time for the annual rant against the incompetence of the NCAA tournament selection committee. This year, I didn’t have time to work out “my” system, tracking every game by every team. And I couldn’t find a stat sheet showing each team’s record against top 50, top 100, and top 200 opposition. So here’s what I did: I tracked every team that made it to the NCAA tournament, got a vote in either the AP or coaches’ poll, or placed in the top 50 in RPI, the Sagarin ratings, or the Pomeroy ratings. I think those five systems are listed in increasing order of accuracy and provide a nice combination of the subjective (the polls) and the objective (the three computer-generated rankings). Moreover, the objective analyses include both disjunctive win/loss and more continuum-based analyses (a blowout is better than a squeaker). I took each school’s ranking in each area, multiplied it by 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, respectively, and divided by 15. (For the two polls, anyone not getting any votes at all was given a 50.) The best a team could do, then, is 1; the worst somewhere in the mid-300s.

At the top, it all looks pretty good: the top three teams in order are Ohio State (1.20), Kansas (2.12), and Duke (2.87). After that it gets shakier. Teams that made the tournament and shouldn’t have: Georgia, UAB, Southern Cal, and Virginia Commonwealth: familiar faces, all. (At least three of the four were relegated to play-in games.) Those who should have got in and didn’t: Virginia Tech, New Mexico, St. Mary’s, Colorado. At least there wasn’t anything egregious this year, although Virginia Tech was better this year than eight teams with at-large bids, and a full dozen teams better than Virginia Commonwealth didn’t get in.

The biggest problems were the seedings within the field, however. Most abused was Utah State, who earned a 5 and got a 12. Really. They’d be a 4 according to their RPI, a 5 according to both polls and Pomeroy, a 6 according to Sagarin. Literally no one lists them below #21 in the country. So how’d they get dumped down to a 12 seed (numbers 45-48)? Allow me to quote myself from last year, when Utah State earned an 8 and got a 12 and UTEP earned a 9 and got a 12: “The crimes of these two teams? They’re from mid-major conferences, they aren’t Gonzaga or UNLV, and they don’t even have the decency to be from the Eastern or Central time zones. What do they expect?” And this year, those stupid Aggies are still located in Logan. They just won’t learn.

Next most under-valued: Belmont, whom Pomeroy actually lists as #18 in the country (a 5 seed), earned a 9 overall, and got a 13. They’re at least conscientious enough to have their campus in Nashville, but man, are they pushy. They seem to think that going 30-4, with all the losses on the road, three of them against tournament teams from the SEC, they should get a little respect. Sheesh.

Other teams seeded at least two rankings below what they deserve: Texas, Kentucky, UNLV, Gonzaga, Missouri, Richmond, Clemson. You know how I said “they aren’t Gonzaga or UNLV” last year? This year, those places get kicked around, too. Mizzou has at least had a strange season: they’ve played really well at home, horribly on the road. So at least I see the committee’s logic. (Besides, they’re Mizzou; don’t expect this loyal Jayhawk to weep much for them.) Clemson, however, earned a 9 (a 6 according to Pomeroy) but had to go to a play-in game. And besides, everyone knows the Big East is invincible, so those Big 12 and ACC teams are just delaying the inevitable. Don’t ask me about Kentucky; I got nothin’.

In the other direction, there’s Vanderbilt, Butler (hey, they were good last year), Michigan, UCLA, and Tennessee. Most over-rated: UCLA, who earned a 12 (a 13 from Pomeroy) and got a 7. No individual metric has them higher than a 9; none of the objective systems have them above an 11. Go figure. Plus, two teams from the SEC (not counting Georgia who shouldn’t be in the field at all and got a 10-seed) and one mediocrity from the Big 10 (deserved a play-in game, got an 8). No surprises there.

Of course, it’s not just the under-rated teams that suffer: in other words, not only should Utah State not have to play a 5-seed or Belmont a 4, but Kansas State and Wisconsin both deserve easier first-round games than the Aggies and the Bruins will provide. On the flip side, while Pitt is supposedly the overall 4th seed, no one familiar with the game thinks their bracket isn’t hands-down the easiest. The Panthers don’t deserve a top seed to begin with, yet they get a 2 who should be a 4, and a 3 who has two 18-point losses (one at home, one on a neutral site) in March. As the overall #4, they should have to face the overall #5 (or somebody who beats them) to make it to Houston. The best other team in their bracket is at #9 and fading fast.

Last year, Duke rode precisely this scenario, the overall #4 and by far the easiest bracket, to a national championship. It will be much harder for the Blue Devils this year, as their prospective 3rd and 4th round opponents are actually both under-rated. [EDIT: Apparently the NCAA has decided that the first game of the tournament for 60 of the 68 teams in the new format is now the 2nd round. It was the first round last year, but there are big-conference mediocrities in the play-in round this year, not just champions from less prestigious conferences, so of course we have to change the numbering system. Therefore, Duke's 4th and 5th round opponents are likely to be high-quality and under-rated teams. Sheesh.]

The real problem with the system is that teams like Utah State may well lose in the first round: they should be about evenly matched with Kansas State. And if KSU prevails, the talking heads will all babble about how USU wasn’t so good, after all. The point is, Utah State should have drawn Bucknell, not the Wildcats, who were rated #3 in the country at the beginning of the season. Similarly, significantly over-rated UCLA may win over (also over-rated, but less egregiously so) Michigan State; but they should have had to face Georgetown in the first round. (I'll also note that the Jayhawks might well face another second-round game against a team significantly better than their seed: hopefully, they won't play like they did last year.) Still, despite the structural advantage to being over-rated, I’ll predict a better tournament record for the teams I’ve identified as under-rated than those I’ve called over-rated, despite having to play higher-ranked opponents. Last year, they went 10-9 vs. 4-11, respectively.

In the Supreme Hypocrisy Sweepstakes, the NCAA Has Opened a Slight Lead on University Administrators

No fewer than four headlines about topics touching on education have caught my eye in the last 24 hours. Two of them have to do with collegiate sports, two with other issues. Sports today; other topics tomorrow (I hope).

We start with the apparent inevitability that the whores brain trust at the NCAA will, sooner rather than later, announce that the field for the men’s national basketball tournament will be expanded from 65 teams to 96. The same NCAA that crows incessantly about “student-athletes” but won’t actually require programs to take some responsibility for the academic progress of their players (my screed here) now sends forth its VP Greg Shaheen to proclaim with a disingenuousness that would make Sarah Palin proud that, in the expanded format, “the amount of time student-athletes would be out of school would be roughly the same as the current model” and there’d be “a reduction in travel time.” Yeah, right. A team that would earn a 9-seed in the current arrangement would have to play on, say, Thursday against a 24-seed (!), meaning they’d miss class for a minimum of three days (Wednesday through Friday). If they win, they play again on Saturday (against an 8-seed). But at the end of the weekend, we’re only down to 32 teams, not the current 16. So there needs to be another game, probably against a 1-seed, on Tuesday, meaning those players would miss another three days (Monday through Wednesday). And if they keep winning, they’d be expected to play again on Thursday and Saturday. Then they could go home for two whole days of classes before having to show up, by NCAA dictum, at the Final Four site by Wednesday, with games Saturday and Monday. In other words, if a 9-seed or lower made it to the national championship game, they’d miss 8 of a series of 9 classes that meet MWF. Think that can’t happen? Given the stupidity with which the exalted selection committee under-values any team that isn’t from a so-called power conference, I don’t.

Let’s leave aside the dilution of the tournament with even more mediocre teams from big conferences: if NCAA lapdog Minnesota coach Tubby Smith really “[doesn’t] see any watering down at all,” then he’s even stupider than I thought. Let’s duck, too, the thorny issue of what to do with regular-season champions from smaller conferences: include them and their conference tournament is de-valued, exclude them and the regular season is de-valued (these teams are currently guaranteed a spot in the NIT, which would presumably disappear). Let’s just concentrate on the fact that the NCAA chooses to actively disprove its own pretensions of “student-athletes.” That formulation sort of loses something if you won’t even allow these kids to go to class, don’t you think? By the way, I endorse John Feinstein’s analysis, which I read after having already come to virtually the same conclusions. This decision is about one thing only: short-term profits for the NCAA and its water-carriers the athletic departments. The fans, players, and long-term good of the game? Are you kidding?

In other sports news, it seems that some of my brethren and sistern in the academic field are getting a little disgruntled that in an era of shrinking budgets, athletics departments don’t seem to be being asked to tighten their extra-large belts even a little bit. While it is true that the football and men’s basketball programs at some universities make money, athletic departments as a whole don’t. Indeed, there are precisely two major public universities in the country—Nebraska and LSU—in which the athletics departments receive no subsidies from their respective universities. So it is, for example, that the Faculty Senate at the University of Memphis has proposed that the university eliminate its $2 million underwriting of the Athletic Department (this measure would still leave untouched the $7+ million per year the department gets from student fees). The $7.7 million subsidy by the University of California at Berkeley is similarly under fire. All told, as described in this January article from USA Today, while the rest of us have been trying to find ways of cutting back, in athletics departments at the 99 public universities in the power conferences, subsidies from the general fund grew “about 20% in four years, from $685 million in 2005 to $826 million in 2008, after adjusting for inflation. At more than a third of those schools, the percentage of athletic department revenue coming from subsidies grew during the four-year period studied.” That would be an average of over $8.3 million per school per year. That's well over 100 faculty who could have been hired or retained, or more than 300 full-ride scholarships to students who, you know, have something to offer in the classroom.

It may or may not be true that successful, big-time, athletics programs lead to alumni giving and student satisfaction: the fact that it's Conventional Wisdom doesn't make it true. All I know is that a win over Harvard in my undergrad days was as much fun as a win over Mizzou in my grad school days. As for funding, well, according to the most recent figures in the Chronicle of Higher Education, there are ten institutions with an endowment of over $1 million per student: of these, precisely one, Stanford, is in a major athletic conference. Even when we eliminate the per-student component, we’re left with the simple fact that only four of the schools with the twelve largest university endowments, and only about 46% of all universities with $1 billion endowments, have big-time athletics, and several of those that do (Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Virginia…) aren’t perennial powers in any major sport. [Note: the tables are password-protected: if you don’t have a Chronicle subscription, you’re going to have to trust me on the numbers.] So I’m thinking that there isn’t exactly a one-to-one correlation between attracting donors and going to a BCS bowl game.

On the one hand, the faculty protests at Memphis and Berkeley and wherever else are more symbolic than pragmatic. No university president has the courage to suggest that their sainted football or basketball coach isn’t worth $1 million a year, or that a bunch of functional illiterates shouldn’t take up space in classrooms, lower the level of discussion, and generally be coddled and cooed over. N.B., I am fully aware that there are a great many people about whom the term “student athlete” isn’t an oxymoron. I’ve had them in my classes. But I’ve also had the others—the ones who think they’re entitled to a good grade in my class because they can catch a football well enough to start for a team that went 4-8 in Division I-AA. No, expecting anyone in a university administration or on a Board of Trustees to care more about real student achievement than about whether the team goes to the Petunia Bowl—that would be asking far too much. But maybe some good will come of the outcry, anyway: if nothing else, I suspect at least a few more people now know that it’s the universities who subsidize athletics, not the other way around.

Fulminations of the Season

It’s the time of year when, over a three-week period, the sports world concentrates its attention on college basketball. Even the most casual observer enters the office pool, often picking winners based on such thoroughly rational evidence as how cool the star player’s name is, or what the school colors are. We actually filled out a bracket for our cats this year: they picked the Kansas Jayhawks to win (because they know who buys the food and they like to eat), but otherwise picked all schools with cat mascots (Panthers, Tigers, Cougars…) to win, schools with dog mascots (Bulldogs, Lobos…) to lose, and, in the case of both/neither, played the chalk. If, as could happen, the Vermont Catamounts go on a tear, our girls are winning that big-screen TV. They probably stand as good a chance as anyone.

So this isn’t about who’s going to win. It’s a one-and-out tournament, fueled by emotion and momentum that no other tournament can match. Really, who can stay awake through the NBA tournament or the Stanley Cup playoffs, with their multiple levels of best-four-of-seven series? If your team is playing, sure, but it takes a hardier soul than I to sit through game two of a potentially seven-game quarterfinal series between Chicago and Detroit if you’re a New York fan. Wake me up when this game matters. And, at March Madness time, upsets are always the order of the day. The University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople probably knows they’ve got about as much chance of winning the tournament as Sarah Palin does of becoming president of the Sierra Club. But if they play the game of their lives, just once, and beat Perennial Power University, well, that’s a memory that isn’t ever going to fade. Anyone who has paid even passing attention to recent tournaments knows that some shooting guard from Spider Breath State can drain six or seven threes in a row, and all of a sudden that prohibitive favorite team they’re playing had better change their nickname to the Piñatas or be accused of false advertising. So no, I offer no predictions here, beyond the presumably obvious fact that I’m picking my doctoral alma mater to win it all.

No, this is about the selection process, and the manifold problems thereunto appertaining. There’s the silly and insulting play-in game, added because the power conferences couldn’t possibly survive without one more mediocre team in the field. True, no 16-seed has ever won a game in the NCAA tournament, but to win your conference tournament and then not even get to play that #1 seed is really pretty crappy. And now there’s a rumor that the field is going to be expanded to 96 teams … or even to everybody. (Anybody wanna guess why this guy works for NPR instead of The Sporting News?) The NCAA can be counted on for few things, but doing stupid things in the pursuit of fuzzily-defined or utterly venal goals is a real long suit for them. Note to the nanny-staters: if your special little snowflakes want to make the NCAA tournament, have them win their conference tournament. Win and you advance, lose and go home: same as in the tournament itself. As of this writing, an unscientific MSNBC poll is running against expansion by 87-13%. Of course, the NCAA couldn’t care less about the integrity of the tournament, fans’ wishes, or anything that doesn’t get them short-term profits.

There is indeed part of me that just wants the teams that didn’t make the field to try playing better instead of complaining. True, Mississippi State was unlucky to lose the SEC tournament after Kentucky sent the game to overtime with .1 of a second left, then won on an off-balance 3-pointer that was by any reasonable assessment more luck than skill. That said, when you know their guy is going to try to intentionally miss his free throw, how about if you box out… and if not then, then on the ensuing brick of a jump shot? No? OK, enjoy the NIT.

Still, the selection process is at least as much a function of politics as of analysis: there was even a rationalization on national television the other night for Duke's extraordinarily favorable bracket because this is, after all, entertainment, and the NCAA “needs Duke to do well.” Really. He said that. Like the rest of us should shut up about it instead of becoming angrier still because of this. (Sorry, can’t tell you which particular idiot talking head on which network…)

Anyway, I thought I’d try a little experiment. I worked out a formula to include every game played all season long—where and when it was played, who won, and by how much. This generates two numbers: who’s played the best over the course of the season, and who’s playing the best right now. It might not be the most accurate system imaginable, but it has the advantage of objectivity: the closest it comes to being subjective is in judgment calls about, for example, how much of a home-court advantage Kansas has when they play in the Sprint Center in Kansas City. (For the record, I’m calling that a 3-point advantage, vs. 5 for games in Allen Fieldhouse on the KU campus.) Then there are the RPI and Pomeroy ratings, and finally the AP and ESPN polls. (For the polls, all teams who received no votes at all were ranked as 50th.) Take those six numbers, add ‘em up, and see what you’ve got.

My Sweet Sixteen then, in order (their actual seeds are in parentheses): Kansas (1.1), Duke (1.3), Kentucky (1.2), West Virginia (2), Syracuse (1.4), Ohio State (2), Kansas State (2), Georgetown (3), Baylor (3), Brigham Young (7), Purdue (4), Villanova (2), Temple (5), Maryland (4), Butler (5), Wisconsin (4). So, in general terms, we agree. Of my Top 16, the committee put all but one in a 5-seed or better; of their Top 16, I had all but one as a 5-seed or better. At the bottom of the bracket, I’d have included Virginia Tech and Mississippi State instead of Wake Forest and Florida—and, indeed, I had five other schools ranked ahead of the Demon Deacons: Dayton, Seton Hall, Illinois, Memphis, and VCU. (Of course, it’s a complete coincidence that Wake’s Athletic Director is on the selection committee. Yes, it is.) Notably, I don’t think all the whining on Syracuse’s behalf has a lot of legitimacy: I had not only Duke but also West Virginia ahead of them. And the kvetching that they’ll have to play their second-weekend games in Salt Lake City instead of Houston: really? That matters when you’re Utah or the UofH, not when you’re coming from Syracuse or Durham. Also, of course, their first weekend is in Buffalo, which is closer to Syracuse than Oklahoma City is to Lawrence, or New Orleans is to Lexington.

In addition to the two teams I don’t think should have been in the tournament at all (who got 9 and 10 seeds), there were nine teams seeded at least two seeds higher than I think they deserve. In order of their ranking: New Mexico, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, Oklahoma State, Minnesota, UNLV, Gonzaga, Louisville, Missouri. And there were nine teams seeded at least two seeds lower than they deserve: Brigham Young, California, Northern Iowa, Georgia Tech, Washington, San Diego State, Cornell, UTEP, Utah State. From this list, let’s throw out Louisville, Georgia Tech, and New Mexico, all of whom have had seasons that have been all over the place: impressive wins and incomprehensible losses. Ranking them is tough. Beyond that, it’s pretty predictable.

Look at the teams the committee loved: six teams from the middle of power conferences, three perennial mid-major powers. The most egregious cases are Vanderbilt and Notre Dame. Vandy somehow got a 4-seed despite not being in the top sixteen teams in any of the six different ranking systems: their best performance is in the AP poll, in which they were 21st. That’s a 6-seed. Their RPI gives them a 7-seed, their Pomeroy a 9-seed. And based on who’s hot right now, they’d be out of the tournament altogether. They deserve a 9. But the committee loves the SEC. Oh, yes, they love the SEC.

Then there’s Notre Dame. They are hot right now. But their RPI is 49 and their Pomeroy is 38. What I find interesting is that not a single one of the 31 voters in the ESPN coaches poll (and those are people who know the game pretty well, right?) listed them in their Top 25 (38 teams got at least some mention), but the committee in their wisdom gave the Irish a 6-seed, making them one of the top 24 teams in the country. Someone explain that to me, please, without using the phrase, “well, they’re Notre Dame.”

Of those under-rated by the committee, gee, you notice a trend? Two very good teams who won their under-respected conferences but aren’t traditional powers, and a bevy of teams from the Mountain and Pacific time zones. There are several particularly outrageous rankings here. Let’s start with Brigham Young. Whereas Vanderbilt got a 4-seed without any ranking of 16 or better, BYU was relegated to a 7-seed (making them somewhere between 25th and 28th overall) without any ranking below their RPI of 23. Their Pomeroy is 7 (a 2-seed!), and they’re tied for 16th in one poll and 17th in the other. But they’re not from a power conference, and they’re, you know, Mormon.

California and Washington are particularly interesting cases. Normally, the Pac-10 gets more respect than they deserve. Not so this year. Cal is in the top 20 in both the RPI and the Pomeroy rankings; I had them 19th overall and 13th at the end of the season. Despite the fact that none of the voters in either poll gave them a single vote (the voters probably have to go to bed early, poor babies), Cal still works out to a 6-seed instead of the 8 they got. Yet, the idiots at CBS (apologies for the redundancy) couldn’t figure out how the Bears made the field at all. Similarly, Washington was #9 on my list of hot teams at the end of the year, and #18 for the year as a whole. Their RPI was 41; their Pomeroy 29; they won their conference tournament. I think they deserved a 7 seed; they got an 11.

And then there’s Northern Iowa. They won both the regular season and the conference tournament in the Missouri Valley, which has consistently been the most under-rated conference in the country for years—or has the committee forgotten the recent exploits of Southern Illinois, Bradley, et al.? Their Pomeroy of 32 (an 8-seed) is their worst ranking; their RPI is 17, and I had them at 16. For this they get a 9-seed, and, if they win their first game, they meet Kansas in the second round. They’re a legitimate 5-seed, and they got jobbed. (So, of course, did KU, by potentially having to face a team a whole lot better than a 9-seed in the second round.)

There’s also UTEP, whose worst ranking is an RPI of 37 (9-seed), but they got a 12-seed. They were ranked 25th in one poll, 27th in the other. They earned an 8-seed. So did Utah State, who also got a 12. Their lowest ranking in any of the six systems was also a 37; their Pomeroy and RPI rankings were 20 and 30, respectively. The crimes of these two teams? They’re from mid-major conferences, they aren’t Gonzaga or UNLV, and they don’t even have the decency to be from the Eastern or Central time zones. What do they expect?

All told, the committee’s performance this year was pretty much incompetent and possibly corrupt. In other words, a little above average for them.