DeCourcy / making brackets

[mu_hilltopper]

It's been interesting to read the sportswriters take on their bracket making workshop .. I noted the part about top 50, top 100 games, and "how many games were played against the lowest-rated teams. "

(cough)


http://www.sportingnews.com/yourturn/viewtopic.php?t=177264

Bracket mystique
February 14, 2007

Mike DeCourcy

After 12 hours of work, when all 65 teams in our pretend NCAA Tournament bracket had been selected and seeded, I had no idea how many Big Ten teams were in the field. There had been no time to count them. And, having burned out my retinas looking at the numbers required to do all this work, I had no patience for unnecessary math.

The NCAA's decision to invite 20 members of the media to take part in an accelerated version of the NCAA Tournament selection process was, primarily, an exercise in myth-busting. Those of us who participated made plenty of discoveries about the system, about what is and is not involved. It might make for a good TV show.

Myth: The selection committee considers the number of teams invited from a particular conference.

We went through 28 votes to select and seed the teams. We compared Brigham Young to Texas to Georgetown to Vanderbilt. We did this primarily by looking at breakdowns of those teams' results against RPI top 50 and top 100 opponents--and at how many games were played against the lowest-rated teams. We never once said, "We need more Pac-10 teams."

Myth: A team's number of recent tournament appearances and its success in those appearances affects its chances of getting in.
When we asked NCAA staffer L.J. Wright for information about a team or two, there was no stat category for past tournament achievement. We left out Illinois, Louisville, Xavier, Maryland -- teams with consistent appearances over the past decade. It's hard to imagine why history would even come up as part of the discussion.

Myth: Having a star player helps a marginal team make it.

We asked NCAA vice president Greg Shaheen whether committee members consider the appeal of individual players. He says that does not come up. There is a tendency of some members, though, to rely on the test former committee chair C.M. Newton used to talk about: Would I want to play them? If the answer is no, that's a tournament team. And who says "you don't want to play me" louder than Texas' Kevin Durant?

Myth: While making the bracket, the committee tries to dream up appealing TV matchups.

There are so many bracket rules to follow. For instance, the first three teams from the same conference must be assigned to different regions, and rematches of regular-season games should be avoided. There is so much attention paid to competitive balance and keeping teams close to home that it's nearly impossible to deliberately create games such as the 2001 second-round affair involving Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski against then-Missouri coach Quin Snyder, a former Blue Devil.

We put Michigan State in a 7-10 matchup against Nevada, with the winner getting a likely second-round game against Marquette. Golden Eagles coach Tom Crean helped Tom Izzo build MSU into a national power, and the two remain close friends. That matchup just appeared. No one thought to make it happen.

Myth: Having someone from your school or conference on the committee helps your team.

With the NCAA computer program, it's not possible for a committee member to vote for a team he or she represents. SEC commissioner Mike Slive can't participate in any discussions related to teams in his league; he can respond only to direct questions about them.

When SEC teams are discussed, the commissioner leaves the room. Our experiment couldn't duplicate the personal element, though. Does a committee member want to face Slive after stiffing one of his teams? We had fun chasing out Tony Barnhart of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Steve Wieberg of USA Today, who portrayed Slive. But they didn't care whether, say, Alabama made it because they don't work for the SEC. It might be different when the process is real.

Myth: Picking the bracket is easy.

Maybe it is if you simply write teams on a blank sheet of paper. If you do it like the NCAA does it, with a complex, repetitive balloting process and pages of data to consider, it's exhilarating--in the way running a marathon or climbing a mountain might be. I don't know. I haven't done those things. But now I have been a member of the selection committee, if only for one very long day.