Selection Committee Member's Speech

[RockawayHoya]

Here's an e-mail I just got from a friend about a speech made by a selection committee member a few days ago. Interesting read.



"My dad just sent me an email. His company up in Hartford had a special speaker last friday, Greg Shaheen who is in charge of the NCAA selection committee. My dad missed the presentation, but he watched a video stream of it on his company network. Here's his summary of it, some of it I already knew, some other stuff is pretty interesting.


The Hartford sponsored a presentation by Greg Shaheen in our auditorium this past Friday, I was busy and didn't go, but I was looking at a streaming video of it yesterday. He's in charge of the NCAA selection committee, and he provided a very interesting presentation of how the committee makes its selections, particularly for the at large teams.

Some of the points I noted - the media focuses on RPI, the committee uses it, but in aggregate more weight is on actual games, reviewing game tapes, injuries during the season, they look for the best teams, regardless of conferences, look at win/loss record, how close were the games, in conference, out of conference, difficulty of schedule, wins on the road. How teams did in prior NCAA tournaments is not considered. He mentioned a bit of trivia about what conference had the most teams in a tournament, but I got interrupted and didn't catch it, it sounded like it was one of the conferences in the middle of the country and 7 or 8 teams made it. The committee has team stats on all 326 Div 1 teams, committee members monitor all 31 Div 1 conferences throughout the year. Committee members cannot be lobbied by schools or other parties supporting a particular school. another bit of trivia, Greg gets in excess of 3,000 emails a day.....

Oh, the presentation was entitled - "Bracketology 101". Another tidbit, when they schedule teams for each region, when they bring up the team, the air miles to each region is displayed. Also, if the team has played three games at the regional site during the year, they are disqualified from being put into that region, so that all teams are playing in a more or less unfamiliar environment.

[SFHoya99]

Couple of thoughts...

Was this your friends' dad or just a passed on forward?

The trivia is a combo of the Big East (7 in 1991) and the Big Ten (7 in ?).

There's nothing new here I've seen except the airline miles. However, though the committee discounts using the RPI that much, truth is that for whatever reason, RPI is a great indicator. They may not use it much, but whatever they use correlates well to RPI.

As for "game tape" I have to laugh at that. There's simply no way game tape can or should be used as evidence. I'm all for watching games, but no individual game gives you a proper impression of a team's full body of work. And these people don't spend that much time on this to be watching 100+ games they otherwise wouldn't. The committee may do a decent amount fo prework, but they only meet for two days together from what I understand.

[Big Dog]

Use game tape. We all know that the Duke-Gtown game would be the first one they'd watch, and that could only work in our favor.

[RockawayHoya]

My friend's dad watched the meeting, wrote the above email (minus the first paragraph which my friend wrote). Those were his notes he jotted down during the meeting. Obviously this isn't a published article or anything, so take it for it's worth.

[jerseyhoya34]

I think they look at "feel" somewhat. Why else do members appear AT games? They're not just sitting in a back room and ruminating over Pomeroy, Elo Chess, Sagarin ratings, offensive efficiency, and the like.

[HoyaSinceBirth]

I'm thinking mabye what he means is that the comitee members are expected to be watchign game tapes of teams through out the year so as to have an impression of how good teams are by watching them. who knows?