How will Covid-19 pauses affect NCAA Tournament seeding and bubble teams?
The virus has added an additional layer of uncertainty to a process already rife with questions.
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It’s an inescapable evil, a looming presence that casts its shadow across the nation, a plague that seemingly acts under its own volition without regard for the public’s expectations or best efforts to mitigate its risks.
But enough about the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee folks!
We’re roughly a month out from Selection Sunday. Next Saturday, the Selection Committee will unveil its top 16 teams as they’ve done in years past. For a lot of folks, it provides a window into how the Committee is assessing and evaluating potential tournament teams up to that point in the season. More than anything else, it’s a hell of a tool for the College Basketball Content Industrial Complex to have in its bag to take advantage of the post-Super Bowl sports discourse void.
There’s one question that might be more pressing than any other that the Committee will face on Saturday and every day moving forward until the final bracket is finally released: How the hell do you factor in Covid-19 pauses and the ensuing results?
In one way or another, virtually every team in the sport has been impacted by a Covid pause. Whether it’s a pause within the program or with an opponent, schedules have been ripped and shredded many times over. Accounting for the inequities in games played is a monumental challenge for a process that has historically been slow to take up change.
It circles back to a debate in college basketball circles that has grown increasingly divisive: should more weight be put on the eye test or the data?
Subjectivity vs. Objectivity. A tale as old as time.
Let’s take a team like Saint Louis for example. The Billikens went over a month between their games against UMKC on December 23 and Dayton on January 26. Seven of their games were postponed due to a Covid-19 induced pause in the program, some of which would have been potential opportunities for solid resume wins for a team that had completed a strong showing in the limited non-conference slate.
Unsurprisingly, Saint Louis lost to Dayton in its first game back, giving the Billikens a Quadrant III loss on their team sheet. A matchup with Richmond three days later was postponed, and then Saint Louis lost to La Salle last week for a second consecutive Quad III loss. And then naturally, they bounced back over the weekend with a double-digit win against St. Bonaventure, a team that has had its own Covid-19 issues that will also be fighting for an NCAA Tournament bid.
Which of those results is a better representation of Saint Louis? Is it the team that went a month without playing a game and consequently looked like shit in their first couple of games back? Or is it the team capable of a stifling defensive performance against another tournament caliber team.
The context of these types of situations is important to take into consideration.
The results of the games are what they are. Saint Louis isn’t absolved of a couple of bad losses just because of bad virus luck. But should they carry less weight than a similarly bad loss of a team might have suffered it in the course of regular (or as regular as it can be) schedule?
Unsurprisingly, the longer the layoff, the further decline in performance. Based on an analysis by Evan Miyakawa, teams coming off of an extended pause are underperforming relative to normal expectations.
Another interesting case is a team like Xavier. The Muskateers had a torrid run through their non-conference slate and are comfortably in the field right now, but they’re in the midst of a Covid pause. As conferences scramble to make up as many games as possible before conference tournaments arrive, teams like Xavier could find themselves in a situation in which their performance suffers simply due to the sheer volume of games being crammed into a small window. All because of poorly timed Covid pauses.
There are simply too many caveats, qualifiers, disclaimers, etc. that will go into a subjective analysis of a team’s resume that makes it a less than optimal way of selecting teams. The Eye Test should not be anywhere near the conversation this year (or really any year, for that matter). It’s virtually impossible to expect every member of the Committee to be able to watch all of the teams that need to be considered a sufficient amount in order to make a decision on their worthiness based on a set of criteria that that person has deemed make a team “good” in their eyes. What I think makes for an NCAA Tournament team differs from what a Committee member thinks which differs from what the person reading this thinks.
The challenges of creating a bracket this season should be the impetus for an increasingly data-driven method of building a bracket. Performance-based metrics such as Wins Above Bubble and Strength of Record are well suited to account for those challenges. The premise of "Here’s the hand that you were dealt this season, how did you perform relative to your peers?” would make more sense than a group of folks in a conference room hemming and hawing over ambiguous criteria.
More than anything, it would provide transparency to the process. Analytics is not perfect by any means, but they would remove the motive for those in the room to influence decision making by ensuring that every team is operating under the same set of rules and criteria.
Ultimately, it would still come down to wins and losses. While the NET has proven to be a step forward in trying to provide better evaluation tools, it’s still merely a metric that is used for classifying wins and losses via the quadrant system, leaving room for interpretation and human error or subjectivity.
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have my favorite team miss out on the NCAA Tournament because of clearly established statistical criteria that determined that they didn’t make the cut instead of a small group of decision-makers that decide that, in their opinion, that my favorite team doesn’t deserve to be in.
Covid-19 has and will continue to leave its mark on the college basketball season until the nets are (hopefully) finally cut down in April. There’s still too much of the season left to know how we’ll arrive there and what the NCAA Tournament field will look like. The only thing we know for sure is that it’s brought an added level of uncertainty to the process that will only put the Selection Committee under further scrutiny than it already is.
In the future, it’s time to take out the guesswork and follow the numbers. Put everyone on an even playing field and you’ll still wind up with a kickass tournament.
You just won’t have to deal with the backlash of human error.
See you next Monday. Enjoy the hoops.
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