NCAA 15 Selection Process

Yesterday, I saw something that I had never seen before. A list that showed how the committee ranked every team from 1-68. I have recreated the list and marked in green the automatic bids.

So you have your teams that win the power conferences, those tend to be pretty good. You have three mid-majors that were safely in but won their tournament anyways and then you have 22 teams that wouldn't make it in without winning their conferences.

So this reveals this year that the tournament includes the top 46 teams in the country. What we don't know is if the committee were to rank the next 22 best teams, if Wyoming would be in that list. Kenpom has Buffalo at 54th in the country but Wyoming at 102nd, so that's not really a useful guide. Regardless, if you're in the top 46 teams in the country, you're in the tournament.

Also, most people are shocked that UCLA was ranked so highly (not even in the last four in) so I thought of one simple metric to judge resumes: record vs tournament teams.

Here are the records vs tourney teams for the 10 bubble teams, sorted by winning percentage, green made tourney, red didn't.

Old Dominion 3-1
Colorado St 4-5
Dayton 2-3
Richmond 3-5
Ole Miss 4-7
Illinois 4-8, UCLA 4-8, Boise State 2-4
Temple 2-6
BYU 1-5

I know this isn't a perfect metric. Here a loss against Wisconsin is the same as a loss to Wyoming and a win over Georgia State is the same as a win over Baylor. But I still find it interesting.