Obviously, the committee doesn’t use a straight numerical formula. Their power lies in keeping the process a back-room thing. They are perfectly capable of creating a measurement which would create transparency and let exactly everything they need to do to move themselves into an at large bid. That they haven’t shows that they’d favor the backroom process.
If I had a say, I wouldn’t turn the decision making over to a formula either. From my point of view, there are too many variables to ever feel comfortable that you had adequately accounted for all of them. The approach that the NCAA uses does allow room for humans to occasionally make a mistake. But by making it a committee decision, it gives the Selection Committee the opportunity to over ride a mistake that was inadvertently buried in the “formula”.
We agree on far more things that we disagree on. But it seems like we have this conversation almost every year…and that’s OK with me. The one thing that I would change about the selection process is to install some type of independent review to catch the mistakes that creep in from time to time. If nothing else, it would give the committee chairman a chance to get his reasoning straight before going on national TV to be picked apart by the media.
