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
