Its hard to make the BCS look like a well-oiled machine. But with the release of the field of 68 Sunday night, the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee certainly came close.
Jay Bilas called the at-large selections of VCU and UAB over snubs Colorado and Virginia Tech “indefensible,” Dick Vitale likened it to “picking Roseanne Barr over Scarlett Johansson in a beauty contest” and seemingly every other talking head on ESPN added more fuel to the fire burning underneath the selection committee. Seth Greenberg, head coach of the annually-spurned Hokies, posited that the committee has an “agenda, and that agenda doesn’t include Virginia Tech.”
It was so bad that Randy Bennett, head coach of yet another bubble team, Saint Mary’s, went so far as to suggest infecting college basketball with the three most poisonous letters in American sports—B-C-S.
“As a coach, as players, all you want to know is that you’re given a fair deal,” Bennett said. “You need to go by the numbers, exactly like they do in the BCS.”
Now, Bennett’s suggestion might be a little extreme, and it certainly sends a chill down this writer’s spine. But make no mistake, this year’s bracket shows that, much like the BCS, the selection committee is broken.
UAB and VCU had all but fallen off the radar of every so-called “expert” over the past week, and not without good reason. UAB beat one tournament team—ironically, VCU—while losing to fringe-tournament teams Georgia and Memphis (twice). VCU did take down UCLA and George Mason, but lost five of its last eight regular season games.
Colorado, meanwhile, finished 8-8 in the much more challenging Big 12, including three victories over five-seed Kansas State as well as victories over then-top 10 teams Missouri and Texas. And we all know about Virginia Tech’s marquee victory that cast the Blue Devils down from the top of the AP Poll.
While none of the four teams is especially impressive, even the most amateur bracketologist can see the difference in the resumes, especially when one delves deeper than just the marquee victories. What’s even more concerning is that the head of the selection committee, Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith, failed to offer any concrete reasoning for the decision.
“When you pull up their résumé and you compare them against everyone else and look at how well a job they did in the regular season, they deserve to be in,” Smith said of UAB and VCU.
No they don’t.
The committee’s blunders extend past even the bubble teams. Florida received a two-seed despite losing to Kentucky, a four-seed, in the SEC Tournament finals. A BYU team that has struggled greatly since the dismissal of Brandon Davies received a three-seed over Big 12 Tournament finalist Texas and Big East Tournament finalist Louisville. And Ohio State, the No. 1 overall seed, got seemingly the most difficult bracket, with North Carolina, Syracuse and Kentucky all potential matchups.
Common sense, it seems, is lost in the NCAA.
Luckily, though, there’s a simple way to right one of the most incomprehensible brackets in tournament history—transparency. For all the faults of the BCS, at least coaches have some knowledge of how the computers work and approximately what influences poll voters. In contrast, the selection committee’s bracket this season is so antithetical to the virtues they extol to the media that if there isn’t a disconnect, the committee is made up of idiots.
Requiring the committee to not only make abundantly clear the qualities on which they judge teams, but to lift the veil on who says what during the selection process, would alleviate that issue. Indeed, the committee would be much less likely to go against their core values if they knew whomever suggested and supported such a move would be made public and be subject of the vitriol of fans, coaches and the media.
Make no mistake, the NCAA Tournament is, was, and always will be an infinitely better system than the BCS. But like its football cousin, this year’s bracket made it quite clear the event is flawed—and the only way to fix it is to, for once, hold someone in the NCAA accountable.
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