by Paul Jordan
A few weeks ago, John Clay of the Lexington Herald Leader was one of 19 people selected for a NCAA Division 1 Men’s Basketball Tournament Mock Selection Exercise. Yea, I know that’s a mouthful to say and it appeared to be an even more intensive undertaking to perform as Clay and his colleagues spent 25 hours over two days to basically come up with a “mock NCAA Tournament”. It’s quite a task as the mockers did in two days what it takes the actual NCAA selection committee five days to do. Regardless at the end, the mockers had their own bracket and a new understanding of what it takes to actually come up with the tournament field.
John Clay took a few minutes to talk with me last week about his experience because I found it an interesting assignment, and hopefully will give the readers of the Wildcat Blue Blog a little more insight as to what an undertaking this is. This is the fourth year that this “mock selection” has been held and John was selected because he is a board member for the US Basketball Writers.
The first question I had for John of course was “What about the Wildcats?”. And the answer was that it was a very evolved process that seeded the top four teams. According to Clay, the members underwent a series of paper ballots where they were asked to rank the teams in order of where they would be seeded. It seemed like more of a process than I would imagine, but in the end, Kentucky ended up in pretty good shape in the top four seeds with all writers coming to a consensus that UK deserved a top four seed:
“They were #3 overall … if I remember I think Kentucky got a couple of votes for number one and were very solidly in the top four teams. I don’t think anyone had them ranked at #5 “
At the time I spoke with John, Kentucky had yet to play Tennessee and I floated the question as to whether Kentucky would still warrant a number one seed even with a possible loss to Tennessee. He did not think that a possible loss to the Vols would be held that severely against the Wildcats and at the time, and that really only one of the teams ranked 5-8 would be a consideration to crack the top four:
“Of all the teams we considered for the top eight, the only one that has really come on has been Purdue”
Now that Purdue big man Robbie Hummel is gone for the season, we would think that Purdue’s star will be viewed with a slightly tarnished aura by the committee, whether it is right or not. Now on the subject of Purdue, I had another question for John. Let’s say that Purdue did finish strong and make the top four seeds. How would the committee rank Purdue, seeing that the Final Four was just going to be held in the Boilermakers back yard: Would the committee seek to send Purdue as far from home as possible to offset the home court advantage in the Final Four?
John replied that the higher seeds are seeded first in the most favorable position to them, regardless of who was in the Final Four. The committee “is a real stickler to take each team individually”. Since Kansas was a number one seed, the would be seeded the closest to campus and so on. At the time of the mock draft, Kentucky was #3 and Villanova was #4 and I wondered about Villanova getting the close Syracuse regional site because they were the closest. “Not so” John replied. “When placing the seeds, you don’t worry about the number 4 team when placing the number 3 team”. So since the mileage calculator showed Lexington closer to Syracuse than Salt Lake City, UK went to Syracuse while the other cats were sent packing out west.
The other question I had was the possibility of a UK/Louisville second round matchup like Joe Lunardi has had in a couple of his bracketologies. John laughed a bit and said that such a matchup is not something the committee looked to do since they tried to avoid pairing teams that met during the season but that it was possible. He said that that point in the selection, the committee was more concerned about selecting the right at large teams instead of trying to create a dream matchup.
Right now, everyone is pretty much obsessed with the RPI rating, but I was kind of surprised to find that the RPI was not really the be all and the end all when seeding teams and selecting at large teams. John said that most committee members give weight to different rankings. Clark Kellogg for instance, was a big fan of the road wins and he would give more weight to road wins than strength of schedule. John told me that the RPI is probably given more weight when determining the at large teams but seeding the teams is a little different:
“When you are separating teams in seedings, you look at the strength of schedule. I prefer wins against top 50 teams. We had a situation where a team had three wins over top 50 schools and a similar team had two, so we gave the preferred seeding to the team with three wins”.
I think that surprised me the most was how in depth this whole process was. John mentioned that at the end of the seeding, Virginia and Florida were on the bubble as the last at large teams considered. The committee were getting reports of a “simulated conference tournament” which pitted Virginia against Duke for the ACC automatic bid. As fate would have it, the Blue Devils won and Florida got the last at large bid. If Virginia had won, they would have taken the bid from the Gators.
It sounds like a fun weekend, kind of a “fantasy camp” for stat freaks. John admitted that the amount of information given was almost too much:
“There is almost too much information thrown at you and I do love the numbers. But when you get down to the end, you don’t see a lot of difference between the last 10-12 teams. They all have their warts. This year you could say we were hard pressed to find the 65 quality teams”
And all of this brings up the inevitable talk of the expansion of the tournament to 96 teams and this was a topic of conversation among the mock committee. Clay noted that the “Sports by Brooks story said that this is a done deal, it’s not close to being a done deal”. He also went on to say that the NCAA expansion “is not close to being ratified — it’s just under discussion … it’s not even in a committee”.
Clay did say that he expects there to be some form of expansion. John mentioned that he had talked to former UK AD C.M Newton about the possible expansion of the tournament:
“CM does not think that it will go to 96 but there will be sort of expansion with possibly more play-in games … CM does seem to think there will be expansion but it may not be as dramatic as 96. CM may be biased on that as he is now the head of the NIT committee and this would affect him”
Hopefully you found this look at the mock selection committee as fascinating as I did and it shed a little light on the arduous task it is to come up with the 65 teams. I also want to give John a huge thanks for taking the time to talk with me. Here is a link to John’s original article.
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