A Bubble-Bursting Reason to Gripe? 2007-03-12 00:39:33 | By: Troy Somero 
In Syracuse right now there is utter shock. The campus of Drexel University in Philadelphia is full of long faces. Manhattan, Kansas just had all of the air rush out of the city. The NCAA Tournament pairings have just been announced, which can mean only on thing: fans of every "bubble-busted" team are gripping about the fact that their teams were robbed by the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee of their chance to compete for a national championship. With all of these emotions expressed by players, personnel and pundits it is extremely easy to lose focus of the major task of the committee: to the chose the 34 best at-large teams in the nation.
It is virtually impossible to quantify the selection process because it essentially comes down to the monstrous effort of sifting through endless game tape and statistical information in order to even attempt to quantify this information. Additionally, it is ludicrous for anyone to expect the members of the Selection Committee to sit down and say something like, "Well these fifteen teams had an above .500 record on the road, but only five of them had a road-RPI above 100," because this information means very little when one is watching a game live on television. However, the most efficient way to determine which teams, if any, were truly "robbed" on Sunday night is to do the very thing the committee cannot do: quantify the data by using a mathematical formula to determine which bubble teams deserved a bid to the Big Dance and which ones did not. It is difficult to compare a Syracuse to an Old Dominion or an Appalachian State to an Arkansas without being biased. Usually there are two types of biases when comparing major programs to mid-major programs. The major program bias is a mindset which states that teams from major conferences deserve the nod over mid-majors because they play more difficult schedules throughout the season. In contrast, the mid-major program bias is a mindset which states that mid-major teams deserve the nod over major programs because they never receive the same opportunity as the major programs to play against quality opponents week-in and week-out. This begs the question, "What would happen if we remove this bias and look at the teams without knowing what conference they belong to, or who the teams even are for that matter?" In order to answer this question the teams need to be viewed without the name bias. After viewing the statistics it appears that there is a jumbled mass of sixteen teams (the last eight, at-large tournament qualifiers and the "next-best" eight teams that were left out) that need to be sifted through and organized. Below is a list of the two groups, representing the sixteen teams that will be analyzed throughout the rest of this article. Last-Eight Tournament Qualifiers Arkansas Georgia Tech Illinois Old Dominion Purdue Texas Tech Stanford Xavier First Eight Out Air Force Appalachian State Drexel Florida State Kansas State Missouri State Syracuse West Virginia With the list of sixteen set, the next step is to determine how these teams should be compared. Specifically, what criteria should be used to determine which eight teams truly deserved the last eight bids? More qualitative comparisons such as best win or worst loss do not allow for a fair, unbiased comparison because who is to say that, for example, that Florida State's win over Florida is better or worse then Missouri State's win over Wisconsin. For this reason, the criteria chosen allows for undisputable, qualitative comparison between all sixteen teams. Nine different categories are chosen because of (1) their obvious appeal to the men on the Committee, and (2) the balance they provide between conference, non-conference, home, road and neutral court analysis. The categories are listed below: Overall Winning Percentage (Win %): a team that wins 25 or more games will appeal to certain committee members no matter who that team played. Wining Percentage vs. RPI Top 100 (Win % RPI 1-100): most of the teams in the tournament are from the RPI Top 100, so this category allows for a comparison that can be easily transferred to the context of the tournament. Road and Neutral Court Winning Percentage (R/N Win %): the entire tournament is played at a neutral site (unless you are Louisville or North Carolina this week). Winning Percentage vs. This Year's Field (Win % vs. Field): the best indicator for how a team will perform in the tournament is to view a team's record against teams that are actually in the tournament. Winning Percentage vs. the Other Bubble Teams on This List (Win % vs. Bubble Teams): the only statistic that really matters is the final score - if a team has beaten the other teams on this list then it deserves the bid over every team that it has beaten. Strength of Schedule (SOS): best indicator of how tough a team's schedule was this season. Non-Conference Strength of Schedule (Non-Conf SOS): best indicator of how much of an effort a team made to schedule strong opponents this season outside of the conference. Ratings Percentage Index (RPI): the Holy Grail of college basketball statistical analysis that takes into account a team's SOS (50%), its opponent's SOS (25%), and its opponent's opponent's SOS (25%). Non-Conference Rating Percentage Index (Non-Conf RPI): the Holy Grail without the conference bias. With the teams and the categories selected, it is time to crunch the numbers to differentiate between the teams that were truly snubbed and the teams that have nothing to gripe about. But, before this is done, the identities of the teams must be concealed to make sure that there is no bias associated with the statistical analysis. With this done, the calculation is ready to commence. Below is a chart that compares all sixteen teams (labeled randomly Team 1 through Team 16) across all nine statistical categories. All statistics are from ESPN.com's Inside RPI Daily ranking as of Sunday, March 11, 2007.
As you can tell, this analysis does not state much about how Team 1 fairs against Team 2 and Team 3 in a comprehendible or highly quantitative manner. Therefore, the next step is to rank all sixteen teams based on how their numbers compare to the other teams on the list. The ranking system is quite simple: the better a team's statistic is compared to the rest of the field, the higher its ranking is. 1 is the highest (best) ranking, while 16 is the lowest (worst) ranking. Once all of these rankings are tabulated based on the statistics above, a final column (*Average Ranking*) is added to the chart to determine how the teams faired overall across all of these categories. The average ranking is determined by averaging the rankings from all nine categories to achieve a single, cumulative ranking. Also, any ties from the chart above are likewise treated as ties below, with all teams tied earning the highest possible ranking. For example, Teams 1, 14 and 16 all tied with respect to the Win % vs. Bubble Team statistic above. Therefore, all three teams earned a 1 ranking in the chart below.
This chart is very telling as to just how large the difference is between he teams that did deserve an at-large bid based on the statistics charted above and the teams that did not deserve an at-large bid based on the statistics charted above. Teams 14 and 16 separated themselves slightly from the other top few teams but greatly from the bottom three teams. The point of the breakdown was to determine which eight teams deserved the last eight at-large bids to the NCAA Tournament based on comparative statistical analysis. Clearly, Teams 14, 16, 1, 10, 3, 6, 15, and 7 are the top eight and therefore deserved the last eight at-large bids. (Team 7 was chosen via tie-breaker over Team 5 based on the fact that it ranked higher in more statistical categories by a 5-4 margin.) With the unbiased statistics presented, it is now time to reveal who the teams are. Below is a list with the pseudonyms alongside their respective programs. Team 1 - Xavier Team 2 - Purdue Team 3 - Old Dominion Team 4 - Georgia Tech Team 5 - Illinois Team 6 - Arkansas Team 7 - Texas Tech Team 8 - Stanford Team 9 - Syracuse Team 10 - Drexel Team 11 - Kansas State Team 12 - West Virginia Team 13 - Florida State Team 14 - Air Force Team 15 - Missouri State Team 16 - Appalachian State This revelation indicates that the following teams should have received at-large bids based on unbiased, qualitative comparison presented above: Air Force, Appalachian State, Xavier, Drexel, Old Dominion, Arkansas, Missouri State, and Texas Tech. Out of this group of eight, only four of these teams actually received invites to the tournament: Xavier, Old Dominion, Arkansas, and Texas Tech. There are a number of other additional conclusions to draw from this chart: - The second highest-ranked team on this list, Appalachian State, is from the tiny Southern Conference and was not given a serious look by any pundits this weekend despite the fact that the team won five impressive road games this season (at Virginia, Vanderbilt, VCU, Davidson and Wichita State)and finished with 25 wins. So much for the love for the small programs from the Committee and the sports media industry in general. - Drexel, the mid-major that seemed to have the biggest reason to complain as of 7PM Sunday night, actually ranked higher on this list than Old Dominion, the inter-conference rival that beat Drexel twice this season. - The most surprising team left out of the tournament, Syracuse, was also left out of this field of 65. Even more interesting is the fact that Syracuse is the second-best "left-out" team in the rankings above and was likely the second-choice for the Selection Committee amongst the teams left out of the tournament (based on the fact that Drexel won at the Carrier Dome earlier this season). - Illinois, Purdue, Georgia Tech and Stanford were all given at-large bids to the NCAA Tournament but would not have been chosen based on the criteria above. Again, major conference bias seems evident here, as teams like Air Force and Appalachian State had much better profiles than these teams but were still left out of the tournament in favor of their major conference brethren. - Kansas State has nothing to complain about. The Wildcats ranked 15th in the chart above, but it is highly doubtful that any of this information would help Bob Huggins rest easier tonight (or stop gripping for the next year to the Committee for that matter). Thus, it appears as if the committee got it half-right. The major programs that deserved to be selected to the dance were actually selected by the Committee (yes, even Arkansas), but many major programs that did not deserve bids were given bids nonetheless (Stanford!?!). The rise of the mid-major is a step in the right direction over the last decade in college basketball, but until the major-program bias is completely quelled teams like Drexel and Appalachian State will never be given the respect they truly deserve in the eyes of the NCAA Selection Committee. *Team 15 did not play against any other teams on this list. For the purpose of the rankings they were given an 8 for Win % vs. Bubble Teams, a median value that seemed fairer than giving the team a zero.
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Copyright © 2006 Write On Sports LLC. All rights reserved.