Big 12: Late-season results lessened in value?
UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero, chairman of the NCAA basketball committee, conducted a teleconference today, and I learned a few things I didn’t know about the process.
1. The committee takes an initial vote strictly based on what teams should absolutely be in the field. Guerrero says that vote usually brings anywhere from 18 to 30 teams into the field, and those teams are set in stone. “What we consider no-brainers,” Guerrero said. “These are the teams that we feel are locks, whether they win their (tournaments) or not. In essence, once they’re in, they’re in. Then we’ll be narrowing down the rest of the under-consideration pool for the rest of the week’s discussion, and we’ll begin to massage the field and put those teams in as the week progresses.”
2. The seeding process comes quickly. In other words, the committee doesn’t wait until it has all 65 teams to start seeding.
“I believe that we’ll immediately get to the seeding process,” Guerrero said. “We can certainly do that, possibly seed a couple of lines, always knowing that we’ll need to scrub those as the week progresses. You know, we’ll have X number of teams in the field by virtue of our initial ballot, and by virtue of those teams that have already made the field as a result of either their automatic qualification status, whether they won the conference tournaments or in the case of Cornell, they’re in the field because they won the Ivy League. All those teams will immediately be in the mix and we’ll start sorting through the process at that time.”
3. The last 10 or 12 games of a team is not as important as we’ve been led to believe. In fact, that stat – record in the last 12 games – has been removed from a team’s column sheet. For example, a team would have a variety of stats listed. Record, conference, RPI, strength of schedule, etc. Until last season, record in the last 12 games was listed. But that has been removed, not because how a team finishes no longer is important, but because the committee wanted the public and media to realize it’s not as valuable as maybe they had been led to believe.
“Obviously a win is a win,” Guerrero said. “Every win is important. Every team’s résumé is different. It’s certainly one of the factors as we evaluate what that body of work is. There are a number of criteria that are subjective in many ways, but each committee member places a different weight on certain kinds of things.
“We certainly understand that teams can mature over the season, that there’s a learning curve possibly early in the year. During the season a lot of things can happen. You can deal with issues of injuries, a number of things that can affect how a team performs. It goes back to the old: Who you play, when you play, with whom did you play and how you did. That’s something that we still think is very, very important.”
But, Guerrero said, “every game counts. The committee members will decide how they want to weigh whatever variables they think are the most important.”
SEC commissioner Mike Slive was the committee’s chairman in 2008 and 2009 and made a point of saying that November and December wins should not be discounted, that doing say rendered that portion of the season almost exhibition status. But the previous chairman, Princeton athletic director Gary Walters, indicated there was a big difference between early-season and late-season wins.
“They all count,” Guerrero said. “You can’t discount excellent wins. Early in the year, you get the opportunity to play non-conference opponents of stature, it allows you an opportunity to measure yourself against other teams in the country. That’s why you schedule those games. That’s why you play in a lot of those pre-season tournaments, things of that nature. You want to be able to demonstrate, even early on, that you’re a quality team. So you can’t discount those wins in late November or December.
“We took the last 12 games off of the team sheet because there was some real concern out there that there was a misconception about how we were evaluating that whole situation, how much weight we were putting on it. Certainly an 11-1 team in one situation versus a 7-5 team in another situation could be evaluated completely differently based on what the quality of competition was. So we didn’t want to make that just an absolute item or criteria.
“That being said, we all know how teams are finishing. That information is readily available to us. I believe each committee member can weigh how a team finishes as strongly as they want.”
For the record, here are the overall records, conference records and last-12 records of the seven Big 12 teams expected to make the NCAA field:
Kansas: 29-2, 15-1, 11-1
Kansas State: 24-6, 11-5, 8-4
Baylor: 24-6, 11-5, 9-3
Texas A&M: 22-8, 11-5, 9-3
Missouri: 22-9, 10-6, 7-5
Texas: 23-8, 9-7, 6-6
Oklahoma State: 21-9, 9-7, 7-5
Not a lot of trends there, other than Texas and perhaps Kansas State. Sounds like if it got close in a decision on seeding, UT and KSU might go down a slot, all other factors being equal.
-------------Berry Tramel can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including AM-640 and FM-98.1. You can e-mail him here and follow him on Twitter @BerryTramel. Visit Berry's website here.
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