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For those of you who simply cannot wait until Selection Sunday to find out what the Selection Committee is thinking, the top-16 teams will be revealed in a sneak preview later this month. This is not a crystal ball showing exactly which schools will become protected seeds on March 12th…although 3 of the #1 seeds from last year’s preview DID end up as #1 seeds last Selection Sunday (Arizona/Gonzaga/Kansas). Rather, it served as a peek behind the curtain at what the committee was thinking and what criteria they were using in their analysis of everyone’s body of work. HoopsHD’s Jon Teitel got to chat with Selection Committee member Dr. Charles McClelland about Quad 1 wins and becoming committee chairman next year.
There were several topics on the agenda at your annual selection committee meeting last summer: what sort of broadcast/media issues were discussed? The executives from CBS/Turner/TNT met with the committee about different strategies and how to improve in any areas. It is a great way to learn what is most important in terms of TV timeouts, talent, game windows, tip-off times, etc.
How many hours/day will you be working on selection stuff this month? We watch a lot of games but it is tough to put an exact time limit on it: I would say I dedicate a minimum of 4-5 hours/day. We each have 3 primary conferences and 3 secondary conferences. We watch games live and on Synergy and on replay. We have some interaction with all of our conferences and also meet with the women’s selection committee.
If a team wants to make the NCAA tourney, are they better off scheduling decent teams who they think they can beat, or great teams who they can only hope to upset, or a nice mix of both, or other? It definitely helps to schedule teams who are “competitive”. My league is the SWAC and we schedule a lot of guarantee games on the road. 1 thing I learned early on is that the NET is made up of factors such as efficiency, who you play, and whether you won. It helps to play good teams but also to play competitive ballgames. It is hard to know from the start exactly which opponents will be good or bad but you can look at a team’s history in KenPom/Sagarin to get a good idea of how they will do this year. Playing outside of D-1 is definitely not something we want to do in the SWAC, but at the same time you do not need to play all of the traditional powerhouses. If you play competitive/efficient basketball you will significantly help yourself.
Committee members are able to see many modern rankings on the official team sheets (such as BPI/KPI/KenPom) in addition to the traditional ones: how have you made use of these advanced metrics, and do you have a favorite 1? I do not think that any 1 takes precedence over another: they are all part of our toolbox. We have some that are predictive and some that are results-based: we use all of the tools at our disposal to make the best recommendation. The NET is 1 tool of many that we utilize.
A couple of years ago the committee implemented a 4-tier system that emphasizes the location of wins/losses: is there a specific quadrant that you are drawn to the most (lots of Quad 1 wins, any Quad 4 losses, other), and why? Your 1st attention is drawn to Quad 1 wins because that shows that you beat 1 of the top 50-75 teams in the nation. However, it can fluctuate: a Quad 1 win today can become a Quad 2 win tomorrow. Conversely, Quad 4 losses show that you are playing the bottom of the schedule and have not been successful. If I had to hone in on 1 quadrant it would definitely be Quad 1.
How do you measure a team from a high-major conference (who have an entire season to get Quad 1/Quad 2 wins) vs. a team from a less-prestigious conference (who only have a couple of months to get such wins, and often not with any home-court advantage), and does that truly help you find the 36 best at-large teams? 1 of the things that has been synonymous with this tournament is winning the games you play. Our committee believes that a win in November is as good as a win in March so you have to capitalize on all of your opportunities. Power conference teams do have more opportunities for Quad 1/Quad 2 wins, but if you look at a team like FAU, they are a top-20 NET team and have become a Quad 1 opportunity for all of their C-USA opponents.
The NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET) includes metrics such as scoring margin and net offensive/defensive efficiency: do you think that a team should receive extra credit for a victory greater than 10 PTS, and why should anyone care how efficient a team is as long as they are winning games? I do not have a position either way as to scoring margin. The NET matrix has proven to be relatively effective: if you look at the past 2 years it has been as good as any other matrix. We debated internally whether the number of points you win by matters but I think good offensive efficiency means that you are scoring at a very acceptable rate without missing a lot of shots or turning the ball over. On the defensive side, if you stop opponents from scoring then the margin is already baked into that. It is my humble opinion that the NET is not perfect…but it has been pretty effective.
What role do injuries (for example, Ryan Kalkbrenner at Creighton/Kris Murray at Iowa) play on the seeding of a team? Injuries are a critical part of what we look at, including during our conference monitoring. If you are missing 1 of your best players and you lose a game then that is something that we need to know. We want to know when a player comes back and whether he is healthy when he does so: it was very tough to keep track of these things during the peak of COVID.
I know that you try to spread out teams from the same conference into different regions but what happens if a league like the Big 12 ends up with 6 of the top-16 teams in the nation? There are procedures in place to ensure that teams do not play each other until a certain point after the 1st/2nd rounds. It is rare to have so many great teams in 1 conference in the top-16 so it would be an unusual occurrence. A lot of the bracketing is computer-based so it will let us know if something pops up but sometimes it is impossible to avoid it once you reach the Sweet 16/Elite 8.
Next year you will become the 1st person from an HBCU league/school to chair the men’s basketball selection committee: how big a deal is it, and how excited are you? I think it is a really big deal and I am extremely excited! From an overall growth perspective our teams have continued to evolve: Southern University made back-to-back tourneys in the late 1980s with Avery Johnson/Bobby Phills and Norfolk State pulled off a 1st round upset back in 2012. It is a humbling experience to be a part of the greatest collegiate sporting event in the world.