Sowing the seeds we love: HoopsHD interviews NCAA Selection Committee member Keith Gill

For those of you who cannot wait until Selection Sunday to find out what the Selection Committee is thinking, the top-16 teams were revealed in a sneak preview last Saturday. This is not a crystal ball showing exactly which schools will become protected seeds on March 16th…although 3 of the #1 seeds from last year’s preview DID end up as #1 seeds last Selection Sunday (Houston/Purdue/UConn). 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 Keith Gill about the WAB (Wins Above Bubble) and what to do with all of those great SEC schools.

How many hours/day will you be working on selection stuff this month, and do you have any advice for your fellow committee members on how to maintain their sanity on Selection Sunday? All of us on the committee love basketball so we would be watching games even if we were not diving into the data, which means our love for the sport takes care of the sanity part. I spend on average about 2 hours/day doing some work related to the committee, but we just had our bracket reveal so I spent about 4-5 hours/day leading up to that.

Last Saturday the selection committee unveiled its top-16 teams: what has the reaction been like? I have not heard anything negative…so I assume the reaction was positive. We have 5 new committee members this year, so we went through a process like selection week where we bracket the entire tourney (rather than just an orientation). I felt good about our work.

What categories have the biggest impact on a team’s seed (big road win/bad home loss/other), and why are they more important than other categories? That is 1 of the unique things about the committee. The great thing about having 12 people voting on teams is that I might have a category which I find most important, but other voters might care about other categories to even that out. I care about who you played, how many games you won, and where was the game played. Those 3 are the crux of what we are trying to do, and they are weighted accordingly.

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? In my mind balance is always best, even as a general life premise! It is all about the results: if you do not win enough games then it does not matter how tough your schedule is. If you can win 80% of your games against a good schedule, that will keep you close.

The committee uses 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)? As you go through the bracket you are really looking at Quad 1/Quad 2 wins. Auburn has 18 wins across the top-2 quads, which is a ton of victories, and they still have many more opportunities leading into the SEC tourney. When you go down the bracket to select the last at-large teams, a bad loss could weigh heavily against you, so I think it is specific to the scenario you are looking at. Regardless of your seed, if you have a large # of Quad 1 wins, that will play well for the committee.

In addition to the advanced metrics already on the official team sheets (such as BPI/KPI/KenPom) the Committee received some new metrics for this season (Torvik/WAB): how have you made use of these metrics, and do you have a favorite 1? What is helpful about the WAB is that it helps you compare schedules/results. It is very beneficial to take a team with less Quad 1 opportunities and compare them to a power-conference team: if we did not have WAB then it would be like comparing apples and oranges.

The NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET) includes metrics such as net offensive/defensive efficiency: why should anyone care how efficient a team is as long as they are winning games? The way I think about it is that it gives you a sense of how teams play: do they have a dominant defense, are they very efficient on offense, or are they great at everything? The efficiency numbers give you the insight beyond whether a team won: it shows “how” a team won and whether that will “travel”, which is why I think they are very important. If you have a great margin of victory, then you are playing well on both offense/defense, and you will probably play well in the NCAA tourney.

I know that you try to spread out teams from the same conference into different regions, but what happens if the SEC ends up with 12/13/14 teams in the tournament? Our approach for teams who are on the top-4 seed lines is that we try to protect them: a perfect example is from our recent reveal. Auburn/Alabama/Florida/Tennessee were spread into different regions because they are all from the same conference. After that we use our normal seeding practices, which is why Texas A&M is in the same region as Auburn. There are only 4 regions so after you put 4 teams in there you will have to double/triple up.

In 2019 you became the 1st African-American commissioner of a NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision conference: how big a deal was it at the time, and has the trend continued or do you remain “1 of 1″? I am currently 1 of 1: I was 1 of 2 when Kevin Warren got hired by the Big 10, but he later became president of the Chicago Bears. It is a big deal because a lot of people sacrificed in the past, so I am resting on the shoulders of those who came before me. My mom grew up in South Carolina under Jim Crow, so I want to take advantage of the opportunities to open the pipeline for others in the future and ensure that I am just the 1st of many.

You have ties to several schools that are in the mix for a bid this March (you played football at Duke/worked as Senior Associate Athletics Director at Oklahoma/were Assistant Director of Athletics at Vanderbilt): does that make your life easier/harder? It just is. I wish all those schools well…but it does not impact my work on the committee. I take an objective approach so those teams will rise/fall without any regard to my own history.