Hoops HD

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 during a sneak preview in February. This is not a crystal ball showing exactly which schools will become protected seeds on March 17th…although all 4 of the #1 seeds from last year’s preview DID end up as #1 seeds last Selection Sunday (Alabama/Houston/Kansas/Purdue). 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 Jamie Pollard about Quad 1 wins and his school’s huge upset of Houston last week.

What are the primary/secondary conferences that you are responsible for this year, and how many hours/day will you be working on selection stuff next month? My primary conferences are the Big East, Big Sky, and Missouri Valley. My secondary conferences are the America East, Patriot, and SEC. The amount of work as a committee member clearly picks up as we move closer to February. In the first couple of months of the season (November/December) you are getting to know the teams in your selected conferences as well as you can. However, as we move towards February you have to start knowing a lot more about the other teams in other conferences in order to start making your first rankings of all the teams. In February each committee member will need to have their Top-25 so they can vote on the first reveal of Top-16 at our February meeting. That requires you to have a lot more knowledge of the teams outside of the conferences you are in charge of monitoring. As we move to March, the work expands even further as you now have to have your entire list ranked for the field of 68 in order to vote at our March meetings. Personally, I try to watch and follow games every night so I can even out the workload over the entire week and stay updated on injuries, upcoming games, etc. I find doing a little every night keeps me ahead of the curve. When I get to the last week of January I personally start ranking out the entire field every Sunday. That requires about 4-6 hours every Sunday afternoon to do a deep dive on comparing teams against one another so I can feel good about ranking them from 1-68, plus creating my own personal list of the 10-15 teams just outside the field. As we get closer to March, the number of teams just outside the field tends to decline as teams either play their way in or play their way out of the field. I also have an internal committee of staff that I have assigned to various leagues: I meet with that group every two weeks to have them challenge me on my own internal rankings. I have found having the additional sets of eyes, especially for the conferences I am not directly responsible for, gives me more information and helps me create my own checks and balances to best refine my own ranking list before I begin voting with the rest of the 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? I personally think there is not a one-glove-fits-all method to this question. It depends on your conference and also where you think your team fits in that conference during the season in question (experienced team, young team, etc.) For example, in the Big 12, our conference schedule is so difficult that it creates different scheduling philosophies. If you think your team is good enough to win the Big 12 regular season then you are most likely trying to play for a 1-2 seed in the entire field. In order to do that, you need to also play some non-conference games against other 1-2 seed candidates in order to give the committee a clear data point justifying your seed. However, if you think your team is more of a middle of the pack team in the Big 12, you need to understand that you are going to have 8-10 conference losses. As a result, you cannot afford to lose many non-conference games or your overall record will most likely cause you to not get in the field. If I use Iowa State, we start by saying we need to go 9-9 in Big 12 play. Most likely 12 of those 18 games will be Quadrant 1 (Q1) games. We then say we want to be at least 20-11 or at worst 19-12: going 18-13 puts us too much at risk. That means we need to go at least 11-2 in non-conference play. Because we play Iowa every year, plus the Big East Challenge, plus 3 games in a MTE, that means 11-2 is going to be a real challenge. As a result, the other 8 non-conference games really need to be games you are fairly certain you are going to win: probably Q3 or Q4 games.

Committee members can see many different 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 think it is important to note that each ranking has its own merit and no one ranking is the absolute best one. They all measure different things and each committee member has their own personal preference of what metrics they rely on. I personally look at them all, but also have my own calculation which is a combination of several of the different rankings. I tend to personally lean towards efficiencies so I like studying a team’s offensive/defensive efficiencies. However, once you rank the teams (regardless what ranking you used), you then have to compare each team against the teams ranked ahead of and behind them to look for other factors (head-to-head, common opponents, etc.). All the rankings do is simply put the teams in order and then you have to test your order against actual results.

A few 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? Again: there is no one glove that fits all. For those teams that get a lot of Q1 opportunities, it is important to me that they show they can beat other Q1 teams and also are competitive in the Q1 games they lose. For teams that do not get a lot of Q1 games, I tend to look at what they did with the games they did have. If they can only get a healthy dose of Q3/Q4 games, did they win those games and how did they win them (i.e., their efficiencies)? I also recognize that on any given night a good team can have an off-night so I personally do not overreact to a bad loss.

How do you measure a team from a high-major conference (who has an entire season to get Q1/Q2 wins) vs. a team from a less-prestigious conference (who only has 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? My answer to the previous question is how I reconcile these two situations. If you cannot get Q1 games then it is similarly important that you not lose the Q4 games you do have.

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? I see it this way: if you are really efficient then you typically win by a big margin or lose by a small margin. I think efficiency shows when a good team plays a not very good team: do they still show up and play hard and maintain their efficiency or do they not show up and play sloppy? Likewise, when they play good teams, do they stay efficient even when they lose or do they become inefficient and get blown out? Consistency is important to me as I think that shows the mark of a good team regardless of who they play.

What role do injuries (for example, Keiba Keita at Utah/RJ Luis at St. John’s) play on the inclusion/seeding of a team (if any)? The committee definitely tries to take this into consideration. That is why it is important for the committee member assigned to a conference to have a great understanding of not only who was injured and when they were injured, but also what that may do to a team’s seed if we do not account for it. If a player was out for several games that causes a team to be under-seeded, but now the player is back, then their opponent could be playing a team that is much better than what they are seeded. We really try to monitor that and not put either team (both the 1 that dealt with injuries and the 1 playing against the team that had a lot of injuries) at a disadvantage.

I know that you try to spread out teams from the same conference into different regions, but what happens if a league like yours (the Big 12) ends up with 5-7 of the top-16 teams in the nation? When that happens we recognize it is a good problem for that conference to have but also recognize it is still a problem. That is where the pre-established tournament rules of who can play who a second or third time comes into play. Those rules were put into place for good reason.

Last week the Cyclones pulled off a 5-PT home upset of Houston: how nervous were you when the Cougars took a 51-50 lead in the final few minutes after trailing the entire game, and where does it rank among the greatest wins in school history? It was a very fun game to watch because it was two teams that are totally committed to playing great defense. Both teams are ranked in the Top-10 in defensive efficiency so nothing came easy in that game. It also was played in the middle of a major snowstorm so everyone was on a little edge given the weather. We have been blessed to have a lot of great moments in Hilton so it is tough to say that was one of the all-time best…but it was a really great college basketball game. It was also Houston’s first game in Hilton as a member of the Big 12 and we have a lot of respect for their program so it was a very important game for the Big 12 regular season standings.

You have a birthday coming up next month: what are your plans for the big day? My birthday (February 11th) falls on a Sunday this year so I will be spending most of the day (at least 4-6 hours) doing my deep dive on ranking out my top-68 teams. I will be heading to Indy for basketball committee meetings on Monday the 12th as we prepare to vote for the Top-16 reveal so the work I do on that Sunday will be really important.