Here's why I think sending three Western teams to the East regional
this year, presumably to avoid *any* possible intraconference games in
the regionals, indicates that the selection committee's priorities
have changed in the past two years. The last time there were seven
Western and six Eastern teams in the regionals was in 1997. As a
reminder, these were the actual tournament brackets produced by the
committee (see
http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?seeds$1997
for a full description of what was done that year):
5W Mich State (C) 6E Denver U (W)
4W Minnesota (W) 3E Vermont (E)
1W Michigan (C) --+--2E Boston Univ (H)
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2W North Dakota (W) --+--1E Clarkson (E)
3W Miami (C) 4E New Hampshire (H)
6W Cornell (E) 5E CO College (W)
Notice that there are two Western teams in the East regional and five
in the West, making the Michigan-Michigan State matchup in the second
round unavoidable. Here were the regions before teams were swapped
that year (Michigan State is considered an honorary Eastern team to
balance out the field):
Team lPWR RPI Comps | Team lPWR RPI Comps
1 Michigan (C) 1 .628 ND | 1 Clarkson (E) 1 .600 BU
2 North Dakota (W) 0 .588 | 2 Boston Univ (H) 0 .577
3 Minnesota (W) 3 .581 MmCCDU | 3 New Hampshire (H) 2 .591 __CrMS
4 Miami (C) 1 .577 CC__ | 4 Vermont (E) 2 .579 NH __MS
5 CO College (W) 1 .560 __ DU | 5 Cornell (E) 2 .570 __Vt MS
6 Denver U (W) 1 .554 Mm__ | 6 Mich State (C) 0 .547 ______
The committee simply swapped the bottom two teams from each region to
get the actual regionals. But if they had done the same thing that
year as this, and switched the bottom three teams, they would have
ended up with the following regions:
Team lPWR RPI Comps | Team lPWR RPI Comps
1 Michigan (C) 1 .628 ND | 1 Clarkson (E) 1 .600 BU
2 North Dakota (W) 0 .588 | 2 Boston Univ (H) 0 .577
3 Minnesota (W) 3 .581 CrVtMS | 3 New Hampshire (H) 3 .591 MmCCDU
4 Cornell (E) 2 .570 VtMS | 4 Miami (C) 1 .577 CC__
5 Vermont (E) 1 .579 __ MS | 5 CO College (W) 1 .560 __ DU
6 Mich State (C) 0 .547 ____ | 6 Denver U (W) 1 .554 Mm__
There are two possible second-round games if we seed naturally, so the
committee would have reversed Cornell and Minnesota in the West and
UNH and Miami in the East to avoid this, also switching CC with DU in
the East to preserve first-round pairings, but leaving MSU and UVM
where they are to avoid a Michigan-MSU matchup, giving the following
brackets:
5W Vermont (E) 6E CO College (W)
4W Minnesota (W) 3E Miami (C)
1W Michigan (C) --+--2E Boston Univ (H)
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2W North Dakota (W) --+--1E Clarkson (E)
3W Cornell (E) 4E New Hampshire (H)
6W Mich State (C) 5E Denver U (W)
which, like this season's, have no possible intraconference matchups
and three Western teams in the East regional. I can conceive of four
reasons why they did this:
1) The relative importance of the different priorities (in this case,
keeping at least four teams in their own regional versus avoiding
intraconference matchups) has changed;
2) Nobody thought of swapping an extra team before this year;
3) The priorities are the same, but some subtle difference between
this year's and 1997's field made the triple-switch appropriate now
and not then (I'm sure Adam Wodon will tell us what that is ;-));
4) The relative importance of the priorities is not predefined, and
each year's committee picks whichever of the competing possibilites it
feels like.
My feeling is that #4 (possibly with a bit of #2: "Let's try something
new this year") is the case. I have a problem with this, since it
opens up the possibility that the committee will, possibly
subconsciously, bias its decisions based on the teams actually
involved come tournament time. (I wonder if that wasn't done this
year; Boston College was kept in the East last year on the basis of
attendance and pairwise comparisons, even though an intraconference
matchup--which did occur--would have been avoided by sending them West
instead of Yale. Perhaps shipping them in the third swap, despite
obvious attendance considerations, was something of a "makeup call".)
The NCAA's avoidance of opportunities to make the selection process
more objective and algorithmic puzzles me. In fact this attitude
seems to be even stronger in other sports, judging by comments like
"none of us who edit RPIs here at the national office would ever
expect or want a situation where a computer is picking teams for a
tournament" in the article
<http://www.ncaa.org/news/19990215/active/3604n35.html> pointed out by
Bob Stagat last week. It's as if a conference decided that instead of
having a uniquely defined tie-breaking algorithm to seed teams when
their final records were the same (or even similar), they should have
a committee meet the day after the season ended and decide how the
teams should be seeded for the playoffs based on a smorgasboard of
statistical measures and their own personal judgement. (The ECAC did
something like this back when they had 17 teams and a unbalanced
schedule, right? That also amazes me.) The current ECAC tiebreaker
system is complicated, and you could program a computer to resolve it,
but I don't see anyone calling for a "human touch" in seeding the
league playoffs. (This argument works even better for the NFL, where
the schedule is quite unbalanced, ties in the standings are more
common, and the tiebreaker system is deliciously arcane.)
John Whelan, Cornell '91
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http://www.amurgsval.org/joe/
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