The way it should be...

[MemorialMagic]

NCAA Tournament qualifications rules should be:

Automatic Bids:
- Regular Season Conference Champion
- Conference Tournament Champion

Other Criteria
- Must have an overall record above 500
- Must have a conference record of 500 or above
- No team that finishes below a team that is not going to the tournament can go. (ie. The team that finishes 6th in a conference should go if the team that finished 5th in the conference isn't going.)
- No team should be seeded above a team that finished above them in the conference. (ie. The #2 team in a conference cannot be seeded above the #1 team in the conference)
- Record in the final 10 regular season games should count more (conference tournament performance should be considered, but should not be factored into the 'final 10' games). Not sure exactly how you do this, but perhaps weighted as 1.25 wins in the grand scheme.
- Road wins should be weighted a bit more
- Strength of Schedule should be considered
- Stats other than wins and losses should not be considered.

Bottom line - I am a firm believer that a team's performance in-conference should be the biggest determinant. I don't care if a team beat the #1, #2, and #3 team in the country, if they finish 3rd in their conference, they should not be seeded above a team that won the conference.

[UltimateVUFan]

How does this format take into consideration conference SOS (especially criteria point #3)?
e.g.: VU played 3 of the top 4 teams in the SEC per current standings twice. That may well cause them to finish below a team that faced an easier conference slate.

There are other holes that could be pointed out in this system, but this is just an immediate reaction. I agree with some of your ideas, but there is a lot of thought that goes into metrics for tournament qualification.

[alathIN]

I see "bad losses" is nowhere on your list, which we'd be delighted with this year.
But some other bubble year, if a team that got beat by very bad teams got in ahead of us, we'd be wanting to shuffle the rules again.

Margin of victory/loss seems pointless to us this year, because a lot of our wins were close and we lost an ugly blowout.
But some other year if we lost by 1 point in OT road games to the #1, #2, and #3 teams in the nation we'd want those close losses to count for something.

[buffy]

I think they need to weigh the last 10 games like they did in the past. You need to be playing good ball down the stretch. If you're not over .500 in the last 10 games, then that should knock out a bubble team unless there's a clear explanation.

We just have too many turds on our resume. You can't lose to Grambling at home after already losing to Southern Miss. You just can't. You take that loss away, and I think we're still in the discussion with three more wins.

[commadore]

I think they need to weigh the last 10 games like they did in the past. You need to be playing good ball down the stretch. If you're not over .500 in the last 10 games, then that should knock out a bubble team unless there's a clear explanation.

We just have too many turds on our resume. You can't lose to Grambling at home after already losing to Southern Miss. You just can't. You take that loss away, and I think we're still in the discussion with three more wins.

Such as Auburn, who is 3-7 in their last 10.
Also, I am not sure we can continue to call the Southern Miss loss a bad loss. They are currently 25-6 and lead the Sun Belt with a 14-4 record.

[Versus75]

I think they need to weigh the last 10 games like they did in the past. You need to be playing good ball down the stretch.

The committee seems to be concerned with: “What is the potential for this team to do well in the tournament?”

Otherwise, why bring up the status of injured players in the sense of: “Consider that those losses were with so-and-so out” or “The team should be better now that so-and-so is back.”

Thus, a factor should be: “This team has gotten over its early-season hiccups and is on a roll now.”

[Jason94]

NCAA Tournament qualifications rules should be:

Automatic Bids:
- Regular Season Conference Champion
- Conference Tournament Champion

Other Criteria
- Must have an overall record above 500
- Must have a conference record of 500 or above
- No team that finishes below a team that is not going to the tournament can go. (ie. The team that finishes 6th in a conference should go if the team that finished 5th in the conference isn't going.)
- No team should be seeded above a team that finished above them in the conference. (ie. The #2 team in a conference cannot be seeded above the #1 team in the conference)
- Record in the final 10 regular season games should count more (conference tournament performance should be considered, but should not be factored into the 'final 10' games). Not sure exactly how you do this, but perhaps weighted as 1.25 wins in the grand scheme.
- Road wins should be weighted a bit more
- Strength of Schedule should be considered
- Stats other than wins and losses should not be considered.

Bottom line - I am a firm believer that a team's performance in-conference should be the biggest determinant. I don't care if a team beat the #1, #2, and #3 team in the country, if they finish 3rd in their conference, they should not be seeded above a team that won the conference.

I like this overall, but the major question left unanswered is how is strength of schedule determined? What metric are you utilizing to determine how good a particular team is? Polls? RPI? How do you know how good Southern Miss is? They haven't played anybody that good, but they've been blowing out weak competition, which is why their NET and kenpom ratings are good. How would you rank Florida Atlantic? They have a ton of wins against bad teams - but the computers suggest they are pretty good due to their margins of victory. Do you punish them since their schedule is bad?

I do like MOV included as it does help identify teams at the mid and low major level who are performing at a very high level. It is a challenge to objectively determine relative strengths of teams without some sort of basis.

[mathguy]

NCAA Tournament qualifications rules should be:

Automatic Bids:
- Regular Season Conference Champion
- Conference Tournament Champion

Other Criteria
- Must have an overall record above 500
- Must have a conference record of 500 or above
- No team that finishes below a team that is not going to the tournament can go. (ie. The team that finishes 6th in a conference should go if the team that finished 5th in the conference isn't going.)
- No team should be seeded above a team that finished above them in the conference. (ie. The #2 team in a conference cannot be seeded above the #1 team in the conference)
- Record in the final 10 regular season games should count more (conference tournament performance should be considered, but should not be factored into the 'final 10' games). Not sure exactly how you do this, but perhaps weighted as 1.25 wins in the grand scheme.
- Road wins should be weighted a bit more
- Strength of Schedule should be considered
- Stats other than wins and losses should not be considered.

Bottom line - I am a firm believer that a team's performance in-conference should be the biggest determinant. I don't care if a team beat the #1, #2, and #3 team in the country, if they finish 3rd in their conference, they should not be seeded above a team that won the conference.

Mostly agree, with a few qualifications/provisos.

1st: All the stuff about bids going in order of conference placement ... only matters if your conference plays a full schedule of home and away against every other team in the conference. If, hypothetically, team X plays every SEC team once and then 5 extra games against Alabama, UT, UK, Auburn, and Arkansas but team Y plays every SEC team once and then 5 extra games against A&M, Ole Miss, S. Carolina, Georgia, and LSU ... then well, it's not necessarily fail to say that team X's 10-8 record is genuinely worse than team Y's 11-7 record. I'd also be a bit worried that this would lead to teams with little incentive to schedule well in the non-conference if they only real determiner is their ranking relative to others in conference.

2nd: Abso-freaking-lutely about making a .500 conference record a minimum. I for one would MUCH rather see a mid-low major that was 15-2 in their conference (but lost their conference tourney) than a 7-11 Big 10 team.

3rd: I totally am OK with allowing both regular and tourney champs to get auto-bids ... except that I wonder if in small conferences this would lead to teams tanking their tournaments to get the extra payout for a fellow team. What if you get an auto-bid for both regular and tournament champs ... if ANY TEAM from the conference won an NCAA game the previous year?

[dcdore]

I do like MOV included as it does help identify teams at the mid and low major level who are performing at a very high level.

What about weighting MOV? MOV/L 0-10 = X; MOV/L 10-20 = Y; MOV/L >20 = Z?

[MemorialMagic]

How does the NFL factor in their Divisions and the important of order of finish in their Divisions?

[UltimateVUFan]

NCAA Tournament qualifications rules should be:

Automatic Bids:
- Regular Season Conference Champion
- Conference Tournament Champion

Mostly agree, with a few qualifications/provisos.
…
3rd: I totally am OK with allowing both regular and tourney champs to get auto-bids ... except that I wonder if in small conferences this would lead to teams tanking their tournaments to get the extra payout for a fellow team. What if you get an auto-bid for both regular and tournament champs ... if ANY TEAM from the conference won an NCAA game the previous year?

Interesting points. Reminiscent of how USA Ultimate used to format bids for college nationals back when I played at VU. 16 teams qualified. Each region automatically had one bid. The other half of the bids were allocated based on: (a) region size (i.e., number of teams that participated in the college series by sending a team to the various sectionals tournaments in an effort to qualify for regionals); and (b) results of the previous year’s nationals. Regions that had the strongest showing received an extra bid the following year.

Now, placement (criteria ‘b’) was obviously impacted by having more teams qualify; if you have more teams in the field, your odds of a team from your region reaching the semi-finals is greater. However, the general notion behind this seems reasonable enough, and it might be a way to reward those smaller conferences that sometimes “exceed” expectations in the NCAAT and hinder the Power 5 conferences that potentially under-perform.