How This Year’s NCAA Tournament Would Look If Computers Picked And Seeded The Field

 Send This Story To A Friend

As soon as the NCAA Tournament brackets are announced each year, out come the talking heads, coaches, and fans to complain about the process and its results.  Even with three extra teams in this year’s field, the barking continues.  (As would be the case with a 128-team field, too.)

There’s an easy way to do away with the debate and disputes.  A clear-cut, proven way to end all the seed-whining, bid-complaining and conspiracy-theorizing.

Just BCS it.

BCS the whole NCAA Tournament. 

Now, personally, I think this would be a pretty crummy way of doing business because I rather like the human element playing a role in tournament selection.  Add a couple more basketball folks to the committee and I’d be quite happy with the current system.  It’s not perfect — and it’s never going to be — but for the most part it’s fair. 

Besides, if you’re Team #69 you really don’t have much to complain about because chances are you’re not going to cut down the nets anyway.  And if your team is good enough to actually compete for the title then the difference between a #3 and a #4 or a #4 and a #5 shouldn’t be that big of an obstacle to overcome.

But again, all the arguing can be KO’d by applying a BCS-style formula to the process:


Step 1: The conference tourney winners get automatic bids as they do now.

Step 2: The new formula is used to determine the remaining teams in the field.

Step 3: The field is seeded according to the formula using a standard S-curve (1-8, 2-8, 3-6, 4-5, etc).  Just to keep things neat, the play-in games would go to the eight lowest RPIs in the field with each winner moving on to play a #1 seed.


No fuss.  No muss.  And if a squad sees a conference mate in Round One or has to travel half way around the world to play, they can take it up with the computer that spits out the seedings.

Using the RPI numbers from RealTimeRPI.com as our “formula,” here’s the 2011 field and how it would have been seeded.  Realize that human error and bias has — aside from a few computer programmers — been removed from the process.  So no complaining about what you see below.  It’s all math without partiality. 

Each team’s RPI is listed in parentheses. 

Automatic bids from conference tourneys are underlined. 

Teams not in this year’s actual tournament are in bold. 

(And for the record, we’ve been working on this since Monday afternoon, but pushed up the posting time when ESPN — dang them — briefly discussed a BCS idea on “SportsCenter.”)

So there you have it.  Using an RPI formula, the field is selected and seeded without the aid of human beings.  Harvard, Cleveland State, Missouri State, St. Mary’s and Colorado State would be in while Michigan, Florida State, Clemson, Marquette and Southern Cal would be out.

As you eyeball the results, remember that the Southeast champ would face the Southwest winner and the East titlist would play West champion at the Final Four in Houston.

Like what you see?  Think folks would quietly, happily accept these results?