Case of Indiana shows NCAA selection process needing return to common sense

The NCAA Tournament once was a tournament exclusively for conference champions.

Years later, we’re at a point where it’s not just a joke but a serious question about too many schools: if the NCAA tourney doesn’t take a team, would the NIT want them either?

As Selection Sunday for the 2019 NCAA Tournament nears, memories of recent selection committee patterns, combined with the daily wakeup calls of bracketology projections of the field this year, have brought a reality: this is an event at risk of being diminished, as the recent emphasis by tourney committees on quality wins has jumped the shark.

The unease about a mass of mediocre teams supposedly not just in fringe consideration but with a reasonable chance at the tourney only intensified this past weekend, when a certain team with a record exactly one game above .500 on the season started getting serious buzz again for at-large selection.

Before going any farther, it must be acknowledged: this year’s NCAA Tournament committee has done nothing wrong to this point. Furthermore, every year’s selection for the NCAA Tournament is different, because there are always at least a few changes in the committee’s membership. What we think we know from previous years doesn’t always materialize.

It’s also possible that the selection committee is already ahead of the curve on current concerns. Committees’ emphasis points do change some over the years depending on the different tastes of their members. There’s at least a small chance this year’s members have the same concerns many fans and followers of the tourney selection process do.

And, of course, there are still games to be played and time before Selection Sunday is actually here. Perhaps all of the barely mediocre teams purportedly on the bubble now will clearly play their way into or out of the NCAAs in the next 11 days.

All we have to go on is recent history, though, and the committee’s recent behaviors suggest indeed that in this first week of March, bracketologists and followers of the sport are right and Indiana is a serious candidate for at-large consideration for the NCAA tourney, after the Hoosiers posted their second win this season over Michigan State.

It’s no fun to be Ronnie Raincloud after a team just had one of the high points of its season. Unquestionably, IU’s sweep of the Spartans is newsworthy and a great achievement. Still, the time has come to talk about the Hoosiers’ entire season, not just a couple of games.

Indiana has six Quadrant 1 victories. It has two wins over Michigan State, another over Big East co-leader Marquette, and wins over Louisville and Wisconsin (plus a win over 12-17 Penn State, which inexplicably somehow rates as a top-shelf quad 1 victory).

The Hoosiers also have 15 wins and 14 losses. Their six Quad 1 wins have come in 15 chances. They’re also 1-5 in Quadrant 2 games, meaning in 21 games against the top two quadrants, IU has lost 14, or 66.7% of the time.

But hey, Indiana played a brutal non-conference schedule, right? Wrong. It included some quality games, but overall the slate doesn’t crack the top half of Division I, ranking 190th best in the country. It included home games against No. 166 Texas-Arlington, No. 241 Montana State, No. 245 UC Davis, No. 289 Jacksonville, No. 307 Central Arkansas and 353rd and dead last Chicago State.

IU has been really good away from home though, right?

The Hoosiers are 3-9 away from Assembly Hall.

It’s also not a team playing well in its conference-a 6-12 record good for 11th in the Big Ten. Also, before winning its last two games, Indiana had lost 12 of its previous 13 games. Since the calendar turned to 2019, the Hoosiers have a 4-12 record.

Some have used terms like interesting or “polarizing” to describe Indiana’s current NCAA Tournament resume. At this time, it really should be abundantly clear: if we’re evaluating entire seasons and looking for more than sporadic blips of excellence, Indiana is not even close to an NCAA tourney team, and should feel good to get a home game in the NIT.

If this really is an NCAA Tournament resume, then 1) it is being judged entirely on about five games and 2) losses mean absolutely nothing. And no matter how much some have been conditioned to believe that quality wins are all it’s about, that is a preposterously poor way to evaluate teams’ actual overall strength. Some who wouldn’t know better might even call it lazy.

Don’t mistake this for picking on a particular team. And yes, there is time for the Hoosiers to get a resume to a stage where they could at least be a reasonable borderline at-large team.

As it is now, though, anything less than running the table from now to at least the Big Ten Tournament semifinals should mean Indiana is an NIT team at best. Otherwise, if a team’s record is little more than a small footnote to a season, if high-caliber wins with no drawback for losses is all it takes to get in the NCAA Tournament, then the selection process is broken to smithereens.

Common sense can be a trite term, but it’s really the best one for this discussion, because it should tell us that a resume like Indiana’s is not worthy of an NCAA Tournament at-large berth. It could be said that the tourney’s selection process used to be rooted in common sense, far more than it is now.

Following the selection process for the NCAA Tournament for roughly 30 years, the tourney’s criteria used to be rather straight-forward, yet vastly more thorough than it has appeared in recent years. One could boil down the main factors to essentially eight ingredients:

1) Record/results
2) Conference record/finish
3) Strength of schedule
4) Non-conference strength of schedule
5) Road/neutral record
6) RPI, or whatever ranking system the committee wants to use for ranking well over 300 teams & grouping results against them
7) Record vs. top 50, top 100, top 200 and below 200 teams, with an emphasis on the top 50 first as those are typically at-large caliber teams
8) How a team finished (last 10 games)

Win games, excel in your conference, play-or at least make a genuine attempt to play-a respectable schedule, beat good teams (or at least dominate those you can play), and-if all else is about equal-go with the hotter team. If one also wants to invoke the oft-debated eye test, further evaluation of teams’ results allows as much.

That’s it. Simple, and yet those measuring points tell us much of what we need to know about a team. Their value also goes beyond the basic numbers themselves, helping ensure balance across the country, something the sport today is sorely missing and needs.

A team like Indiana right now fails no less than five of these tests, and probably six. It makes some hay with overall strength of schedule (28), and its overall NET/power rating rank right now (55) isn’t a disqualifier. One might be able to say the Hoosiers are OK against quadrants, except a fair 6-9 mark against Quadrant 1 teams should be cancelled out by an awful 1-5 record vs. Quadrant 2.

The current emphasis by the committee essentially covers maybe 2 1/2 of those eight points, if grading generously. Quadrant 1 wins-not record, but wins-and overall strength of schedule seem to be king, and little else matters. Some will contest that the new quadrants weighting games by location values road games more, but its really only Quadrant 1 road games when the committee seems to care so little about anything that happens outside them.

The tournament selection process should be about comprehensive evaluations of teams, not just cherry-picking a couple convenient numbers to make cases. The NCAA Men’s Basketball Committee would make a major move towards common sense and thoroughness by trimming some of the fat (see: weighted quadrants) and returning to previous evaluation standards.

In any team’s analysis, the most basic thing should come first. A team’s record and winning games should matter, for many obvious reasons. Among them being that the point of the NCAA Tournament is, you know, to try to win it. Besides that, none other than the godfather of bracketology Joe Lunardi has documented more than once (including recently) that teams that lose a lot of games on the average don’t go far in the NCAAs.

Emphasizing excellence against a team’s schedule, though, is also a perfect way to help correct the obvious scheduling inequalities in the sport now. If Team A with more losses thinks Team B with less losses isn’t as good? Fine. Prove it. They can schedule the likes of Team B and regularly make their case. If Indiana had played and won at, say, Lipscomb this year, instead of a needless major conference power rating collusion game against Arkansas, we’d have a better handle on both teams’ at-large candidacy.

For an event with roots as a tournament of champions, it should also be clear-cut that winning in conference should be valued. In particular, a conference regular season championship deserves to be rewarded and prioritized in the selection process.

Any team winning the regular season title in a conference in the top half of Division I leagues should have a major leg up in consideration for an at-large bid if needed. (Research shows it used to be that way from 1985-96.) We’re not talking about an automatic pass, but in general, if a team wins, say, 23-24 games or more and dominates its conference, that should carry considerable weight with the committee, so long as a team at least made a respectable attempt at its non-conference schedule. (Teams like Old Dominion and New Mexico State are some receiving essentially no at-large consideration this year but would match that description.)

Again: reward accomplishment and prioritize this over taking eighth-place teams with 13-14 losses, and you’ll see non-conference scheduling change. You’ll create more interesting matchups in November and December, too, a time of year when the sport perennially struggles for attention.

Now, lest it sound like we’re going to pummel middling major-type teams like Indiana throughout this, we’ll note that having a bunch of losses shouldn’t be an automatic disqualifier for at-large consideration. It can and should be possible that they can qualify.

Common sense should say, though, that the threshold for such teams should be very high. It could almost be said that there should be an inverse relationship: the worse an at-large candidate’s record is, the better its schedule and specifically non-conference schedule should be.

That means teams should have made at least a reasonable attempt to put together a thoroughly challenging non-conference schedule. It also should mean playing on the road out of conference, and more than on an occasional lark.

Tom Penders, when he was the coach at Texas and later George Washington, regularly played outstanding non-league schedules. (The Longhorns played six true road non-conference games in 1993-94, plus the Maui Invitational. Can you ever fathom Texas playing nine non-conference games away from home now?) John Chaney always did the same at Temple. So did John Calipari and, later, Bruiser Flint at Massachusetts.

If a team has, say, a 19-14 overall record, was middling in its conference but played a consistently tough non-league slate-including on the road-then few will argue with letting them in. If their tough non-conference schedule was really an exempt tournament, a conference challenge, two road games or less and still 6-7 guarantee games-sorry-that’s a manicured non-conference slate, not a brutal one.

An increasingly hot opinion in recent years-including from none other than last year’s selection committee chair-is that non-conference strength of schedule is an unnecessary, redundant measurement, even unfair to schools who already play a tough conference schedule, and that overall SOS is really all that is needed in evaluating teams.

In a perfect world, that would be correct. Anyone who has seen college basketball non-conference scheduling knows it is the furthest thing from perfect.

Non-conference strength of schedule is logically the (more) controllable part of the schedule. Taking note of it is necessary to keep teams/leagues from falling back on conference affiliation and influencing power ratings of all kinds with home blowouts out of conference, something North Carolina State has proven this year in the NET is a very real issue with efficiency ratings. And punishing bad non-conference schedules is also a way to attempt to restore some balance in those schedules, a balance that right now is horribly slanted against teams outside the top 6-7 conferences.

We’ve touched on ‘balance’ a number of times now, to the point that some might be ready to shout back by now, believing the selection committee doesn’t owe anyone the legislation of schedules.

Maybe, maybe not. What can unequivocally be said is that the committee does owe teams to get the very best possible read on their quality. And it sure looks in recent years like the committee has had a problem doing just this with teams that don’t have all the scheduling advantages.

The committee’s badly missed evaluation of Loyola Chicago last year-one that almost certainly would’ve resulted in the Ramblers not making the field if they hadn’t won the MVC Tournament-can be directly traced to the committee’s over-emphasis on Quadrant 1 wins, as well as its ignorance of simple measures like road record and a conference championship. (Ironically, the Ramblers’ non-conference strength of schedule last year in the RPI was just 254, though that number wasn’t far behind teams like Houston or Michigan State and was ahead of the likes of Michigan and Texas Tech. It was Loyola’s other marks-among them being a convincing regular season title in the No. 8-ranked conference in the country-that should’ve screamed easy NCAA pick.)

Teams like Loyola have now made five Final Four appearances from nine seeds or lower over the last 13 NCAA Tournaments, or three more than the esteemed BCS or “power” conferences have ever made in 40 years of seeding teams. And yet, judging by how the committee has snubbed them in selection or seeding in recent years, it is having a hard time figuring out how good teams like Loyola are.

If the committee is going to over-value Quadrant 1 wins as much as it has in recent years, then it also has to acknowledge the divide from current non-conference scheduling practices in the sport, which have resulted in a situation where teams like Loyola get few chances at such wins. As such, to do its job better, it would behoove the committee to do all it can to encourage scheduling of teams like Loyola, to help the committee get perspective on their strength.

One can go on and on. A .500 record in conference games doesn’t need to be a hard and fast requirement for at-large consideration, but it should be close. If a team can’t, on average, at least hold serve at home in its conference or, if it loses a home game, win one on the road against one of the league’s very worst teams, it probably doesn’t deserve an NCAA bid.

The conference tournament can even be available to improve that league mark. If a team still has a losing record after that, though, history shows in the seeding era since 1979 that unless it is 1984 Virginia or 2016 Syracuse, those teams will not win as many as four in a row in the NCAA Tournament. That’s 40 years of history showing these teams rarely deserve the benefit of the doubt.

If we are going to reward a team with a losing conference record though, then they better have played a top-notch non-conference schedule. Or, their conference should be crazy tough. We’re talking NCAA/NIT-level squads literally from top to bottom (the 1983-84 ACC which Virginia dwelt from would’ve qualified, with five of eight teams in the NCAA tourney, two more in the NIT, and even last-place Clemson finishing at .500 overall).

Performance in road/neutral games also is a no-brainer for separating teams. Many a team can look like an NCAA Tournament contender at home. Home teams win 67% of the time in college basketball. This season, even 15-12 Louisiana-Monroe, a mid-pack Sun Belt team, is 12-1 at home.

Any team that can win consistently away from home is proving something, even if playing a lesser schedule than an ACC or Big East team. Again, if it’s so easy to do, then the conferences at the top of the food chain with all the advantages can prove it. In fact, Oklahoma did this year, playing-and winning-at North Texas and Texas-Rio Grande Valley, teams in the top half of Conference USA and the WAC, respectively. If the Sooners get into the NCAA Tournament even with an overall poor Big 12 performance but because of wins like that, it’s mighty hard to argue.

Also, a factor recently dropped from the selection criteria should return. It shouldn’t be a primary discussion point, but how a team finished should matter.

In comparing two very similar teams for a spot or a seeding, why wouldn’t one prefer a team that might be playing considerably better than the other right now? Of course we know the tourney is all about matchups, and sometimes teams on the skids late will take advantage of a good draw and get hot. But if a team is stumbling for a long stretch coming in (see: Arizona State and Oklahoma last year) it makes little sense to give the benefit of the doubt for accomplishment months earlier. Counting every game the same-the Selection Committee’s current mantra-is a noble idea, but there are cases where it’s simply not practical and it is obvious to everyone that a team in March is not what it was in November.

The NCAA Tournament has been foolproof for a long time. That doesn’t mean it is invincible.

Selection Sunday last year proved that there is a wrong way to do things, and heaven help us if CBS goes the direction that Turner did last year, revealing the selected teams first before later moving on to the matchups.

The selection process for the tourney, which in the final days and hours before the field’s announcement provides some of the highest drama on the sports calendar, also can be messed up. One might argue in recent years it already has been (see: the incredibly unnecessary pod system), but it hasn’t been enough to question the integrity of the event as a whole.

Reducing teams to a couple wins can do just that, though. Granting at-large berths to teams who would be middle of the pack in the NIT can also do that. Continuing to miss on the evaluations of teams whose ilk have in recent years proven they can be Final Four contenders can do it, too.

The Men’s Basketball Committee seems to make regular tweaks to this event and in particular its selection criteria, yet all of those tweaks have got us here, where teams 1-2 games above .500 in March are more than occasionally considered serious at-large candidates.

This event doesn’t really need weighted quadrants (power ratings and road/neutral record already account for location, and there’s nothing stopping committee members from looking at where particular games were played, either). It doesn’t need drastic weight put on a couple games of a team’s schedule.

All it does need is to get back to basics.

Twitter: @HoopvilleAdam