Maybe it just felt like it as a reader, but it seemed like we had more complaining than any other season about the selection and seeding process during the past season. With the Olympics just finishing and us getting eased into the Fall sports at Duke, I figured that this would be a good time to start a thread for ideas and upsides and downsides of various changes. I know that some changes would never happen because you can't put toothpaste back in the tube so my hatred of midseason releases of brackets if the postseason started right then will continue since it is pretty obvious from TV ratings that fans cannot resist watching them.
Here are some ideas that I have thought about over the past year that might add fairness to the process or not as well as some honesty about how likely they would ever be accepted (pretty much never):
As mentioned above, I think that midseason ranking reviews bias the final rankings because of our general obsession with keeping teams ranked in place until they lose. This is before even getting into the fact that schedules are arranged systematically and the games are not just shuffled arbitrarily, not to mention our favorite griping about ACC schools losing non-conference games, almost all of which happen at the beginning of the season.
One idea that I think would be interesting to try, maybe not in basketball at first, would be to not have the committee gather and create a consensus ranking. Instead, each member would submit their full field and ranking after the last game and then the rankings would be combined into the official order. A computer, checked by a few neutral people, would then place the teams into the bracket according to all of the existing principles. That could actually create a pretty fun bracket reveal show, but I get the sense that the committee actually likes all the arguing and, more importantly, the power conference horse-trading.
That leads to the next point where I would love to see a committee consisting of people who we actually believe have the time to watch enough games to have some knowledge about all of teams involved instead of us knowing that they all have other important job duties. Of course, I cannot see the people with the most power relinquishing any of it to people with less active power. It would be great to have a committee with as little potential conflicts of interest as possible, but that is not happening either. We still get college football polls released soon enough after the last game of the week where there is just no plausible way that voters could see at least any significant amount of each game that week featuring team that would be in consideration for a Top 25.
Here are some ideas that I have thought about over the past year that might add fairness to the process or not as well as some honesty about how likely they would ever be accepted (pretty much never):
As mentioned above, I think that midseason ranking reviews bias the final rankings because of our general obsession with keeping teams ranked in place until they lose. This is before even getting into the fact that schedules are arranged systematically and the games are not just shuffled arbitrarily, not to mention our favorite griping about ACC schools losing non-conference games, almost all of which happen at the beginning of the season.
One idea that I think would be interesting to try, maybe not in basketball at first, would be to not have the committee gather and create a consensus ranking. Instead, each member would submit their full field and ranking after the last game and then the rankings would be combined into the official order. A computer, checked by a few neutral people, would then place the teams into the bracket according to all of the existing principles. That could actually create a pretty fun bracket reveal show, but I get the sense that the committee actually likes all the arguing and, more importantly, the power conference horse-trading.
That leads to the next point where I would love to see a committee consisting of people who we actually believe have the time to watch enough games to have some knowledge about all of teams involved instead of us knowing that they all have other important job duties. Of course, I cannot see the people with the most power relinquishing any of it to people with less active power. It would be great to have a committee with as little potential conflicts of interest as possible, but that is not happening either. We still get college football polls released soon enough after the last game of the week where there is just no plausible way that voters could see at least any significant amount of each game that week featuring team that would be in consideration for a Top 25.
