Well, the official NCAA Tournament Bracket is out, and let me just tell you that it is really a good one this year.  And when I say good, I mean that it’s really a piece of crap just like every other bracket that the selection committee has put out over the years. 

At the risk of losing my press credential for the final in Indy, I have to just tell it like it is.  This is an amateur basketball tournament – most people tend to forget that, but it’s true – and the selection committee continues to conduct themselves in such a manner to make the most money possible out of the tournament. 

Let’s forget for a minute that the tournament is essentially a huge money grab by the largely white establishment, made possible by their pimping out the players, who are largely young men of color.  Sorry to my white brethren, but it’s true.  Everyone knows how wrong it is, and everyone is afraid to write or talk about it it.  Well, everyone but me.  I think I will have to dust off the keyboard some time this week for that column, but since the actions of the buffoons on the selection committee are still hanging in the air like an unclaimed fart, let’s start with them.

Actually, to call them buffoons is probably a bit shortsighted (not to mention mildly offensive to buffoons everywhere).  They are merely puppets following orders to perpetuate every bias that exists.  When I talk about the biases, there are mainly 3, all designed to make the most money possible for the folks that stand to make a financial gain from the tournament.  They are: program bias, conference bias and East Coast bias.  Here are some very quick explanations:

Program Bias. This is the kind of bias that gave Florida a 10 seed this year.  Every expert has been talking for 2 weeks about how Florida is squarely on the bubble, but with the kind of revenue potential Florida has, I guess we are forced to believe that they really were not on the bubble at all.  How else can you justify a #10 seed for that team this year?

Conference Bias.  While I could just as easily cite the Florida example above one more time, this is the kind of bias that had Ohio State ranked #5 in the country in the most recent poll, despite 3 losses to teams with an RPI over 50, one of those to a team with an RPI over 100.  Sound like a Top 5 team to you?  I didn’t think so, but when you play in a conference with enough power to get you some huge bias, then anything is possible, and I guess that the bias apparently does not take a year off when that conference is having a down year.

East Coast Bias.  I am not sure if this one is even worth brining up this year, since the conferences out west were so damn weak.  In fact, the conference bias usually trumps the East Coast bias handily, and this year was no exception.  More on that one later.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will tell you that I have my own bracket.  It is located at www.rpibracket.com, and I created the bracket during the 2008-2009 college basketball season with the express purpose of trying to quantify the screw job put on schools and conferences that do not have as much revenue generating potential as other schools and conferences.  I came up with a pretty good algorithm that uses the data, and nothing else, to determine the 34 most worthy at-large teams at any given point in time.  Oh hell, let’s be honest – my algorithm is not “pretty good”.  It is great.  It is the most accurate measure that currently exists for predicting which teams SHOULD be in the tournament, according to how they have performed over the entire season, and which teams should not be in.

Incidentally, I do not discuss the algorithm itself, except in general terms.  I will, and have on several occasions, shown all data points from 2 schools, side by side, to make for an easy comparison.  I have not yet been unable to clearly defend why one team was included/excluded over another or received a better/worse seed than another.  It’s kind of easy to win an argument when you have the facts on your side.

So, in the inaugural season last year, the selection committee and myself only differed on 4 teams, and that is once again the case this year.  Last year, my job of defending my 4 teams against the committee’s 4 teams was really a walk in the park.  You see, all 4 of my teams were from outside of the power conferences, and all 4 of the committee’s teams were from within the 6 power conferences (in alphabetical order: ACC, Big 12, Big East, Big Ten, PAC-10 and SEC). Kind of the whole point behind why I started RPIBracket.com in the first place…proving, through the objective data, how the selection committee tries to screw the little guy in the interest of making money for the NCAA and its sponsors.

This year, I actually had to work the data and come up with some analysis, other than “the committee wanted to make money, so these 4 teams from the big 6 conferences were in their bracket, and these 4 teams from outside the big 6 conferences were in my bracket.  I used the data to make my decisions and not how much money I could make by pimping out amateur athletes, so my bracket is better.”  This year, all 8 teams involved are from the 6 power conferences.

So, how the heck am I supposed to defend my 4 teams, when their 4 teams are essentially from the same well-privileged few?  Actually, it wasn’t that hard.  Let’s take a quick tour through the 8 teams.

I have: Seton Hall, Cincinnati, Virginia Tech, Illinois

They have: Minnesota, Florida, California, Louisville

Let’s remember what this argument is about, OK?  The selection committee exists for one purpose and one purpose only – ensuring the maximum revenue potential for the NCAA basketball tournament.  And they are damn good at it.  It’s just a shame that so many teams that worked so hard and demonstrated their worthiness to participate over the course of 4 1/2 months have to get screwed in the name of money.

For starters, let me just say that the data is very similar for all 8 of these teams.  California is the one anomaly, with a very high RPI (22), but some absolutely disgusting losses (3 against teams with an RPI of 101+) and only 1 win against the RPI Top 50.  But this is not about the data, because it never is about the data with the selection committee.  It is about the money.

So, which 4 teams of the 8 on that list above have the highest revenue potential in the NCAA Tournament?  Florida, California, Louisville and Illinois, right?  And the other 4 are not even close, right?  Well, that’s three of theirs and one of mine.  I think it really is a crap shoot among all these teams, and it’s really a coin flip if you are looking for another team from the Big 10, so I don’t really have a problem with Minnesota getting in.  Actually, I don’t have much of a problem with any of their teams being in or any of my teams being out.  But it does bear repeating that 3 of the top 4 revenue potential schools out of the 8 are in the selection committee’s bracket, and the other one just completed a magical run to the conference final of…wait for it…one of the big 6 conferences.

So, like I said – no real heartburn there.  You really could have picked any 4 of those 8 teams to fill the field.  I do, however, have a HUGE problem with the level of bending over backwards to accommodate the big conferences this year with regard to seeding…such as Florida being on the bubble for 2 weeks and then getting a 10 seed because they can make lots of money for the NCAA…and every expert saying for a whole month that the PAC-10 is a 1-bid league and the committee refusing to relinquish the extra revenue that comes with making all 6 power conferences have multiple bids.

Now, for the analysis.  Let’s keep this simple.  If my seed is within 2 seeds of that dreamed up by the selection committee, then we will just look at the general analysis.  But for the “big misses”, where a team’s seed in my bracket is 3 or more spots different than their seed in the committee’s bracket, well, that is when we really start to see the bias come out.

OK.  Here is how this works.  “Even” means that the committee and myself have the same seed for that team.  “Too High” means that I gave the team a better seed than the committee.  “Too Low” means that I gave the team a worse seed than the selection committee. Here is the basic analysis for the ones where we were close.

Nothing too squirrely going on there, except for the “1 Too High” section.  Those numbers mean that the data says that the selection committee actively seeded 12 teams from outside the power conferences too low, most probably because they do not want them to advance, as it will cost the NCAA money if those teams do so.  Everyone always claims how much they love the underdog and love watching a mid-major make a deep run.  That is a bunch of bunk.  The George Mason – Florida game in 2006 got some of the lowest ratings ever for a Final Four game.

Anyway, now let’s take a look at the 12 teams where we were off by 3 seeds or more.

Wow.  For those that are mathematically challenged (“A Sea of Blue” readers, I am talking to you…just kidding…you know I love you guys), for the “Too High” columns, a big number on the right means the committee is after some money, and for the “Too Low” columns, a big number on the left means they are after the money.

So, the bottom line is that, of the 12 teams that we both have in our bracket, when we differ on the seeding of that team by 3 or more seeds, in 10 out of those 12 cases (over 83%), you can point directly at the selection committee favoring the teams from the big 6 conferences.

In fact, if you take out the teams where we differ by only 3 seeds, then it becomes 100%.  5 out of 5 teams where we differed by > 3 seeds, the committee was chasing the money.  In case you care, here are the teams with the largest discrepancy.  The non-big-6 conference teams that got the shaft are in BOLD.

So, what does it all mean?  Nothing, I guess.  Is anyone surprised that the selection committee has decided to err on the side of making as much money as possible for the NCAA and its sponsors?

I know I am not surprised one bit.

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