Smoking the Seeds: 2025 (Part Two)

The NCAA Men's Tournament Committee assigned some seeds this year that were wrong, inexplicable, or both. What I'd like to do in this installment is analyze three of the worst Committee designations and explain why they reek.

Louisville 

The first example of Committee misstep was the assignation of Louisville as an eight seed. While the ACC was not on a par with the SEC or Big 10, Louisville was the ACC's second-best team. They sported a gaudy 27-7 record. How did the esteemed Committee (capitalized, like Jesus) come up with an eight seed? Heading into the tournament, the venerable RPI rated Louisville as 14th in the country (a four seed), while the more currently fashionable NET had them at 24th in the country, a sixth seed. Tagging Louisville with an eight, facing a nine in the opener, made no sense. There are only two ways to arrive at that seed. 

First, you'd have to take a really hard stance on the ACC being completely lousy and overrated, which is a tough thing to do when their few inter-conference games ended months ago. Taking this position requires intellectual arrogance and a kind of certainty that has no place in reasoned debate. The second possible way of arriving at an eight seed for Louisville is that you must be (clearing my throat -- ahem, ahem) cheating.

UConn

Next up, let's discuss UConn, the two-time defending national champions, but not a member of any Big Boy football league. UConn's seeding (an eight) is less of an intellectual conundrum than Louisville's because RPI has UConn barely making the tournament, and the NET has them as an eight, exactly where they are. The problem lies in the complete ignoring of what UConn accomplished these last two years. If you think what happened last March doesn't affect what happens this March, well, I have an observation for you. But let's circle back to that in a moment. For now, let me just say that top seed Florida had to rally desperately down the stretch to beat UConn 77-75. 

Why do I have a bit of an issue with UConn as an eight? I suppose it comes down to what I perceive, again, as intellectual arrogance. You have a team, UConn, that has just won back-to-back NCAA titles. Obviously, their league isn't all peaches and cream, no matter what the metrics say this particular season. So why cut off the use of data from two previous years of both UConn and Big East play and rely solely on this season's pitifully limited interaction between Big East teams and the Big Boys? My intellectual issue with assigning UConn an eight and a Florida matchup (which I'm sure the Gators didn't love) is that it requires the following assumptions and mechanics of implementing these assumptions. Pay attention, folks, because I have a solid statistical and logical argument to make here.

What makes more sense: (1) to base an evaluation of a team on a 35-game schedule with one season and no tourney interaction with other conferences' teams or (2) to base an evaluation of a team on three years of data and three years of between-conference games and tournament games? 

Now, you may counter-argue that how can what happened one or two seasons ago have anything to do with this season's team? A fair question to which I could posit a counter-question, namely what do the outcomes of games 80 days ago have to do with the current as-of-today team? 

But hold on, I won't even bother to ask that question, although you can ponder it if you like. Instead, I'll simply skip to a devastating, if hypothetical, closing argument. What if two and three-year NET and RPI averages led to better predictability of outcomes than single-season metrics? What if multi-year stats led to better predictability of tournament outcomes?

Ahhhh, I see some readers' synapses lighting up. What would that mean, indeed? And why has nobody explored this in depth? The questions actually answer themselves. If this hypothesis were true, well, readers can work out the practical consequences. 

And that's why I included UConn in this list of very curious seedings. Because not everything in life is obvious, and sometimes seeing reality involves prioritizing longer term metrics over shorter term metrics, even when the shorter-term metrics are how things are always done.

I will leave this slightly revelatory but patently obvious topic for now and wander along to my third, "What the hell were they thinking?" seeding.

Gonzaga

How did Gonzaga, yes -- that Gonzaga, wind up as an eight seed scheduled to run into Houston in Round Two?

Obviously, the goal here was to eliminate one of these teams as early as possible. This seeding, on the face of it, makes zero sense. The old RPI had the Zags as the 20th best team (a five seed). The NET ratings, again allegedly the most relied upon these days, had Gonzaga as the eighth best team and therefore a two seed. So how did The Committee arrive at an eight seed, especially with Gonzaga looking its best as the season closed?

It's sad when The Committee decides to blatantly handicap particular programs by pitting them against each other as early as possible in a matchup that makes no sense. This wasn't about juggling of metrics, eyeball testing, common sense, or Einsteinian insight that could have landed Gonzaga as an eight seed. This was flat-out, clownish rigging. No math, no scheduling, no analyses of personnel could have landed Gonzaga at eight. 

Thankfully, I wasn't the only person to notice that Frank and Jesse had hijacked the tourney stagecoach. Ben Sherman's "NCAA Tournament Selection Committee makes huge seeding error" appeared Tuesday on msn. That, however, wasn't an error, Mr. Sherman. That was a stick-up.

Conclusion

We'll discuss disparities between spreads and seedings another day. For now, I'd like to ask, (1) "What would happen if we discovered that three-year metric averages actually yielded more accurate seedings than this-season metrics? " and (2) "Why is highway robbery allowed in setting up the world's highest profile basketball tournament?" 

More importantly, why hasn't #1 above been examined and tested (or has it?), and why aren't Gonzaga's fans/alumni suing some Committee into oblivion?

I'd like to leave this installment by emphasizing that reality is not an avatar of anyone's metrics. The metrics are the avatar, the approximation, a flawed and partial representation of reality. Metrics don't factor in what they don't know. The problem, overall, is treating metrics as some kind of reality. 

Bob Dietz

March 26, 2025 

Smoking the Seeds: 2025

During this break between the first two rounds of the NCAA men's tournament and the start of the "Sweet Sixteen," I'll attempt to ask the question, "What evidence can we find that the tournament committee has indeed smoked various substances during its conclave?"

Some of my queries are obvious and certainly not restricted to my personal aging neural pathways. For example, my anthropologist friend, Tony Cavender (author of a book that addresses some of the medicinal prompts the committee evidently favors) noted to me that the tendency to go overboard favoring a particular conference (in 2025, the SEC) has many precedents. Way back in the '80s, when Georgetown and Villanova won the title, the Big East was the beneficiary of all manner of selection/seeding shenanigans (I'm a fan of alliteration).

Next, as Professor Cavender noted, came selection love for the ACC, then the Big 10, and now it's the SEC. I don't think the process of obeisance to the highest profile conference-of-the-day is particularly mysterious. It's all about TV ratings, ass-kissing, and intellectual cheating under the banner of objective metrics. Allow me to review some of the reasons the entire seeding process is semi-ridiculous and as rigged in 2025 as it was in previous decades.

The Problem with the Apple Cart

Now understand what I'm positing here. It's not that you have occasional rotting apples in the apple cart that is the NCAA selection process. It's that the apple maggots have laid claim to the apple cart, and every nook and cranny in the cart is full of them, so that as the cart slouches towards the Final Four, it tends to rot en route. Some years the rot is evident; other seasons the holes in the logic remain relatively hidden.

Don't get me wrong regarding my 2025 perspective on this. Florida, Auburn, Tennessee, and Alabama are all fine basketball teams -- thanks to NIL and the SEC, they may be the best teams money can buy, but when you start adding Mississippi State, Vanderbilt, and Georgia to the SEC tourney collective, you've likely gone a step too far or maybe three steps too far. I give a pass to Arkansas as a fourth step because as a Calipari click-and-drag team, they figured to be NBA-style wickedly dangerous. And no, I'm not saying that because they won two tournament games. I'm saying that because I bet them at 87-1 to win their region.

The Committee would counter-argue that, mathematically, the objective numbers yield the teams they designate. This is a bit of a crock. I'll go Joe Friday here and break it down.

1) The games between conferences are fewer in number, overall games are greater in number, and the inter-conference games take place earlier in the season than ever before. Because the conferences are now enormous, the games featuring mid-major or Conference USA-type squads versus Big Boys ("Power Four") are fewer than ever before. These rare games almost always take place at the bigger school's gym early in the season. Thus, they represent a shrinking percentage of the data matrix on which ranking (and perception) should be based.

2) Because of (1) above, the percentage of the overall schedule featuring games between top mid-majors or Conference USA-type teams and the Big Boys has been reduced. In addition, instead of Big Boys scheduling top mid-majors, they schedule teams from the mid-major conferences that they know are mismatch games. This effectively drags all of the mid-major schools down in any kind of rankings. Big Boys aren't scheduling the High Points or even ETSUs of the world on a regular basis because they are doing the strategically smart thing. 

3) Almost all of the few games serving as inter-conference data examples take place early in the schedule. The Big Boys go months without interacting with the mid-majors or Conference USA-type teams. Two, sometimes three, months is a long time in a basketball season. Using two and three-month old data is an issue. It should be examined with caveats. But because there are so few examples featuring these data points, the data takes on disproportionate weight. Instead of being downgraded because it's old, sparse data always featuring Big Boys on their home floors, it becomes something to focus on that anchors the dated computer rankings because it's the only available data. It's the old story of looking under a street light for your wallet at midnight even though you may have dropped it across the street. It's the only place you can see.

The Elephant in the Room

No one really addresses what I see as the Whore of Babylon smack in the middle of this entire tapestry. And this Whore of Babylon is gesticulating wildly, but nobody acknowledges her.

1) Bigger conferences pay more money to their officials than smaller conferences, usually significantly more.

2) Officials aspire to make more money.

3) Officials therefore aspire to work more Big Boy games.

4) By sheer definition, games between Big Boy teams and non-Big Boy teams are highly unlikely to be objectively officiated. Nobody is out to screw the Big Boys.

I don't understand, given the structure and dynamic, why anyone thinks non-Big Boy schools would always get a fair shake vs. Big Boy schools. This isn't brain surgery. Officials aren't being evaluated by neutral non-human programs. They are being evaluated by people. Why in God's name would an official not lean into a Big Boy bias when officiating these have/have-not games? What, college basketball officials aren't part of our capitalistic, materialistic culture? They are sworn Knights Templar of objectivity and no self-interest?

These unarguable dynamics should be laid out in any discussion of officiating. Instead, we are supposed to assume non-self interest by officials while they work games. Great theory (I said sarcastically). This is the same tribe that, not long ago, bought first class tickets on the conferences' dimes, then traded them in for economy and pocketed the difference. I'm not knocking them; as an old "AP," I'd do the same. Just don't tell me how your tribe is above reproach.

Conclusion

Okay, we got some general 2025 comments out of the way. Tomorrow I'll broach The Committee's bizarre, insulting seedings of UConn, Gonzaga, and Louisville. I'm not sure what they were smoking, but it was good stuff.

Bob Dietz

March 25, 2025