I thought it might be worthwhile to reiterate my position on Niagara's
inclusion in the NCAA tournament.  I think that, given the NCAA's
current way of doing things, i.e., using a system that doesn't judge
strength of schedule entirely accurately and overriding that system
when they judge that a team's conference schedule is overly weak, it
was perfectly reasonable to give Niagara an at-large bid.  It would
also have been perfectly reasonable to give that bid instead to
Minnesota State-Mankato.  (It would not have been reasonable to extend
a bid either to Quinnipiac or to Rensselaer.)
 
That said, I think it would be preferable to use a system which judges
all teams accurately.  I've developed one that I feel does that while
sticking as much as possible to the ideas behind the present selection
criteria.  IMHO it would be fairer for the NCAA to use this system and
not need to make a special judgement of teams based on the strength of
their conferences.  If this system had been in place this year,
Quinnipiac would have been left out of the tournament based solely on
pairwise comparisons, and Mankato would have received an at-large
berth instead of Niagara.  Note that if Niagara's loss to Canisius and
tie against Brown were changed to wins, the Purple Eagles would also
have qualified for the tournament based on their pairwise comparisons
in the modified system.
 
So my position is that while the committee was acting within the
bounds of their stated procedure to give a bid to Niagara, Mankato
"deserved" to be in the tournament more than Niagara in that they are
more highly rated by measures which pay better attention to strength
of schedule.  (I think this is also borne out by a consideration of
the games which went into the PWC between the two in the current
system.)  Niagara was certainly among the top 20 teams in the nation,
however, and they were of the same approximate caliber of any of the
bubble teams.
                                          John Whelan, Cornell '91
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                                     http://www.amurgsval.org/joe/
 
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