by achrist70 » March 19th, 2017, 8:15 pm
There are two major flaws in how teams are selected and seeded.
First off, who is on the selection committee, they are all ADs and 5 of the 6 power conferences are represented. I am not saying ADs are not knowledgeable on college basketball, but the job of Athletic Director at a university can not allow enough time to truly know enough about all of these teams that they are selecting and therefore with the major conferences represented almost fully they are going to know more about these teams and selected them, also and AD is going to worry about the financial part of selecting more than the actual basketball so you want your conference represented.
Secondly power 5 conferences are not punished for a weak non conference schedule, so many power 5 and 1 teams play nobody in the non conference portion of the schedule other than a rival or in a pre season tournament. However they get rewarded for being in the same conference as a Kansas, Duke, North Carolina, Kentucky or Michigan State who go out and play a highly competitive early schedule. Instead they get the SOS increase once they get to conference play because the big dogs play each other. With this and the mid major cellar dwellers losing to many of these at large teams it is hard to seed a team like Wichita who honestly should have been a 4 or 5 but ended up a 10.
I think that you need a selection committee made up of former coaches (possibly 5 one for each part of the country), after that I think you could include a few media members, possibly basketball officials, and a couple of school administrators. But with the committee set up the way it is and who the power is situated in the NCAA this will never correct itself. To me the division of the 36 at large bids should lead to at least a dozen mid major schools getting 1 not 3 like this year, and with those 3 at large are very well known teams.