FanPost

What the Selection Committee Sees

Brian Spurlock-USA TODAY Sports

NCAA Iowa team sheet

(click here for bigger version)

So here's another thing to get obsessed with this week: the NCAA is releasing the team sheets they use in the selection committee meetings. It looks like they are updating them every other day, although I wouldn't be surprised if they go to daily updates. The link above should automatically give you the most recent sheets.

This is important because, as Jerry Palm and others have pointed out, if it isn't on this sheet, the committee cannot use it to determine selection or seeding. Notice that you don't see position within the conference, record against teams in the tourney, record in last 10 games, or a lot of other stuff that tends to get folks riled up when their team is underseeded or left out. It goes without saying that KenPom ratings are not on the sheet.

One thing that surprised me when I looked at this was how underemphasized RPI seemed to be-- it took me a while to even find the number on Iowa's sheet. But when you step back for a second, RPI is everywhere. It shapes the columns that organize Iowa's record-- there's a column for 1-50, 51-100, 101-200, and 201+. (We probably should give credit to McCaffery, Barta, and whoever else was involved with scheduling here-- Iowa's longest column is on the left and its shortest column is on the right. That's how it should look, and that hasn't been the case in previous years.) The sheets are also ordered by RPI, and my assumption is that the committee gets them in a big binder (or virtually on a tablet) and they proceed through selection by just tearing sheets out of the back and using the order order their given as a starting point for ranking the top 68 teams. In other words, if you have a 38 RPI, an argument has to be made for why you should move up-- it isn't a given.

The big takeaway I see here regarding seeding is that Iowa needs to cheer like hell for Indiana and Illinois both in the last game and in the BTT. If they can creep into the top 50 of the RPI Iowa's sheet starts to look really, really pretty. And that's convenient given Iowa's rooting interests in terms of the double bye. So I know it's going to make you feel Groce, but cheer even harder for IU and UI.

(PS if anyone can screenshot Iowa's sheet and add it to the comments I would appreciate it.)

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