College Sports Hotline

Would have had this up earlier but I was watching the WAC title game … Are they done yet, by the way?

OK, welcome to the Hotline’s second annual Selection Sunday preview. Last year, I did it in installments throughout the weekend. This year: One massive (and hopefully comprehensive) post.

Let’s start with a brief review of …

***The selection/seeding process

Based on my interviews and off-the-record discussions with committee members over the years, and based on what I have read and heard from them in other settings, here are four points I cannot emphasize enough:

1. A team’s RPI rarely comes up during the evaluation and seeding process.

What the RPI does, however, is allow the committee to assess the quality of a team’s wins and losses.

In other words, how a team performs against the RPI top-50 and top-100 is critical to assessing its strength relative to other teams competing for the same at-large spot or the seed.

If one at-large candidate has 11 wins over RPI top-100 teams and another has four, well, you see where I’m going.

2. Conference affiliation is not used to determine at-large bids.

The committee doesn’t say, “We can’t give Arizona State a bid because that would be too many teams from the Pac-10.”

The teams are evaluated by their wins and losses, with an emphasis on victories on the road and neutral courts (because nobody plays tournament games at home).

3. The committee wants the best product (ie: tournament) possible.

To that end, it focuses on how teams play in the final weeks of the season (officially: the final 12 games of the season).

It also projects the worthiness of a team based on how it performed during the regular season with the personnel it will have in the NCAAs.

So if a key player is out, the committee will evaluate the team based on how it fared without that player during the season.

4. The most important point, one reiterated today by committee chairman Tom O’Connor on CBS:

Conference tournaments are not nearly as important as a team’s “body of work” — what it has done over the course of four months.

That body of work includes the non-conference schedule, which accounts for approximately 40 percent of the season.

My guess is that, when the brackets are announced, there will be a dozen cases where we can point to a team’s seed and say it wasn’t affected by what it did in its league tournament.

And there will only be a handful of cases where we can say a team’s seed was affected by its performance in its league tournament (ie: Pittsburgh).

That always happens, and we always forget that it happened when the next year comes around.

***The top seeds

Before we get to my best guess on the top-four seeds in each region, a few things to remember about the seeding and placement process:

1. The committee uses an S-curve to seed the teams.

This meams that the weakest No. 1 is paired with the storngest No. 2, and the weakest two is paired with the strongest No. 3, etc.

2. The committee tries to balance the regions as best it can.

3. The “true” seeds are not always what you see in the brackets.

The committee sometimes moves teams up or down one line to comply with seeding parameters regarding such things as rematches, conference clustering and hostile road venues.

So if you see USC, for example, as a No. 6 seed, that means the Trojans’ “true” seed could have been anywhere from a No. 5 - 7.

That also means that a No. 12 isn’t necessarily one of the last four at-large teams to make the field.

Anyhow, here’s what I have:

No. 1s: North Carolina, UCLA, Memphis, Tennessee.
No. 2s: Kansas, Texas, Georgetown and Duke.
No. 3s: Stanford, Louisville, Wisconsin, Xavier
No. 4s: UConn, Butler, Vanderbilt, Pittsburgh

And by region:

East
1. North Carolina
2. Georgetown
3. Xavier
4. Vanderbilt

South
1. Memphis
2. Kansas
3. Stanford
4. Pittsburgh

Midwest
1. Tennessee
2. Texas
3. Wisconsin
4. UConn

West
1. UCLA
2. Duke
3. Louisville
4. Butler

***How many from the Pac-10?

For weeks, I believed the Pac-10 would send a record seven teams to the NCAAs. The league might be the best in the country and is surely one of the two or three best.

But now I’m not so sure, and here’s what has changed: The Atlantic 10.

The A-10 this week went from one bid (Xavier) to at least two (Xavier as the at-large and Temple as the automatic) and quite possibly three (St. Joe’s as an at-large).

Also, South Alabama losing in the Sun Belt tourney means that league will probably get two bids (an at-large for USA and the automatic for Western Kentucky).

All of which — when combined with the WCC situation (below) — should make Arizona State very nervous.

Why Arizona State and not Oregon or Arizona?

Because the Sun Devils played by far the weakest schedule of the three. Of ASU’s 19 wins, more than half have come against teams with RPIs of 200 and above.

Arizona’s schedule is one of the best in the country. The committee says every year that it wants teams to play tough schedules, and the Cats listened.

Oregon’s schedule is better than ASU’s. The Ducks also have more wins than ASU against RPI top-100 teams and fewer wins than ASU against RPI 200-plus teams.

And you can be sure that all three Pac-10 teams will be rooting for Wisconsin today in the Big Ten finals. If Illinois wins, it will gobble up another bid from the at-large pool.

My guess for seeds for Pac-10 teams:

UCLA: No. 1
Stanford: No. 3
USC: No. 5
Washington State: No. 6
Arizona: No. 9.
Oregon: No. 11
Arizona State: No. 12 (if it gets in)

***Details on Stanford

I have mentioned Stanford’s lousy non-conference schedule throughout the season, and many Hotline readers have wondered why.

I’ll tell you why: Because the selection committee evaluates a team’s “body of work,” and the non-conference schedule accounts for approx. 40 percent of the games.

Non-conference schedules matter. They have to matter.

Stanford’s schedule is ranked 61st in the Pomeroy ratings, which is OK. But its non-conference schedule is ranked 291st, which is terrible.

The Cardinal doesn’t own a single non-league win over a tournament-bound team, which is awful. (Note: This could change if Northwestern State wins the Southland today.)

In fact, Stanford only played one tournament-bound team, Siena (a 12-point loss), which is horrendous.

The Cardinal is fortunate that the Pac-10 is one of the toughest leagues in the country, because it’s performance in conference play should (completely or largely) offset that non-league schedule.

It has an impressive 13 wins over RPI top-100 teams because of the Pac-10.

If Stanford had the same resume in a typical year for the Pac-10, then it would be looking at a No. 5-6 seed.

If Stanford had played better teams, it would have a good case for a No. 2 seed. But compare the Cardinal’s schedule to No. 2-seed contenders like Duke and Texas.

Duke played Marquette, Wisconsin and Pittsburgh.

Texas played UCLA, Tennessee, Michigan State and Wisconsin.

Stanford played … Texas Tech is probably the best of the bunch, and the Red Raiders are 16-15.

And because it was swept by UCLA, the Cardinal has exactly one road/neutral court victory over a team projected as a No. 8 seed or higher: beaten one team on the road/neutral court that’s projected to be a No. 8 seed or higher: Washington State.

Like I said, all those games against quality Pac-10 foes should pretty much offset the non-conference resume.

I’d give Stanford a 10 percent chance of being a No. 2 seed (because the Pac-10 was really good and because the committee knows what happened in Pauley Pavilion), a 70 percent chance of being a No. 3 seed and a 20 percent chance of being a No. 4 seed.

And if it’s a No. 4, you’ll know why.

***How many from the WCC?

I thought three early in the week and nothing has changed my mind.

San Diego is in the tournament as the automatic qualifier, and both St. Mary’s and Gonzaga have strong resumes. They should not be derailed by the A-10 situation.

St. Mary’s has beaten Drake and Oregon and played the 32nd-toughest non-conference schedule in the country.

Gonzaga has beaten UConn and lost by 10 or less to Memphis, Tennessee, Washington State and Oklahoma.

Both played and beat good teams outside the WCC, and that’s what the committee has asked them to do.

End of story.