Saturday, March 20, 2010

Who Chose These Seeds?

There seems to be no correlation between the Seeds in the NCAA tournament this year and their status in the polls. Usually, the Coach's poll or one of the other polls is a good indicator of where a team will get seeded in the NCAA tournament. An example would be that a team who is ranked around 21st in polls would end up a 5 or a 6 seed in the NCAA tournament. This of these as "suggested seeds". But this year, the NCAA tournament committee which is charged with choosing who is in the NCAA tournament and what their seed will be seems to have ignored the polls altogether. The first case is Cornell. The Ivy League champions have not been a top 25 team all year, but they have been receiving votes in the polls each week and would have been ranked somewhere between 30 and 35. That would make them an 8 or a 9 seed. Instead, the tournament committee made them a 12 seed. Or on the other side take Notre Dame which hasn't cracked the top 25 all year who ended up a 6 seed. The same as Marquette who anyone who watched the Big East all year would agree was a significantly better team. (But deserved the 6 seed that it received.) Another bad seeding was Gonzaga. They were ranking in the top 25 all year and seemed to have been bumped from a 5 or 6 seed all the way down to a 9 seed because they lost in the Championship game of their conference tournament. Hopefully next year the committee will trust the wisdom of crowd when determining seeds.

1 comment:

Jaltus said...

Cornell was ranked in the final polls, Sienna deserved much better, Duke did not deserve a 1, etc. The seedings were horrible this year. Honestly, this is the worst job the committee has ever done.