Something is broken with the NCAA Tournament selection process: Who takes the blame?

The NCAA Tournament field is set, but not without plenty of debate over how the Selection Committee slotted each team. From contradictions with the NET rankings to perceived lack of emphasis put on Sunday’s games, the frustration of fans and media has been evident.

This is nothing new for Selection Sunday, where the bubble decisions are picked apart using analytics, eye tests, and more. Or is it?

While there has always been a healthy dialogue about the seeding process, the 2024 NCAA Tournament decisions have brought many college basketball issues into focus for the world to see.

The selection process for March Madness is broken, but who or what should everyone blame?

There are many answers to that question – and the final consensus is probably a combination – but here are the primary targets for criticism.

Selection Committee

The Selection Committee is an easy target every year when the NCAA Tournament field is announced. After all, they are ultimately responsible for the entire thing.

A room full of people will never produce the perfect field, and that is not what the NCAA wants, otherwise there are computers much better equipped for the job. The human element is important.

But the committee must find the line between human story and errored system. Blaming the five bid-stealers at every turn just is not enough

No computer would place New Mexico on the 11-seed line of the NCAA Tournament – below the cut line for an at-large bid. In fact, the NCAA’s official metric (the NET rankings) ranked them No. 22 on Sunday morning.

The Mountain West produced six teams, five of them considered at-large. However, five of the six were considered under-seeded by any metric or bracketology projection.

Furthermore, for the first time in NCAA Tournament history, a Top 30 team in the NET was left out of the field entirely. Indiana State is off to the NIT after finishing No. 29 on the season.

“They’re in the 40-range in most of their metrics, a little higher in others,” said Selection Committee chair Dr. Charles McClelland. “It was a very difficult process. But it wasn’t as much as we did not put Indiana State in, as we just ran out of opportunities.”

Meanwhile, the most egregious error came when the committee chose to slot Duquesne as an 11-seed – an oversight which announced to the public that they had predetermined where the Atlantic-10 champion would play regardless of Sunday’s result.

Criticism over the Selection Committee’s lack of attention on Sunday is nothing new, but was entirely too blatant this year. To make matters worse, questions can be asked whether the group even valued Saturday night’s championship games.

Iowa State was debated based on their resume – which included a low non-conference strength of schedule – against North Carolina for a 1-seed. The Cyclones had blown out Houston, while the Tar Heels lost against NC State.

The two teams each finished 27-7 on the season, with 16 wins in Q1 and Q2. However, the Selection Committee ranked Iowa State as the No. 8 overall seed and placed them in UConn’s bracket.

NET rankings

The NET rankings were created to replace a number of data points used by the Selection Committee to streamline discussion about certain NCAA Tournament teams. It introduced the quadrant system, which separates every win into four categories based on factors like the strength of opponent and location of the game.

The exact parameters of the four quadrants can be found here, as detailed by the NCAA.

Some have criticized the quadrant system for being too broad. After all, a road win against Houston is not the same thing as a road win against Samford. Furthermore, a home win against Syracuse is not the same thing as a road win against Radford.

This season, much has been made about the ability to manipulate the NET rankings by beating up on small schools early in the non-conference schedule.

Critics believed the Big 12 and MWC had created an unfair advantage. And in turn, they were punished by the Selection Committee for something which cannot be proven.

McClelland went on to emphasize the non-conference schedule several times during a Zoom call with media members on Sunday night. Mentioning it as much as any other metric or data point.

So what is the point of the NET rankings? The Selection Committee is supposed to use it as a guide, not the end-all-be-all, but they surely have to matter more than metrics like non-conference strength of schedule if the NCAA endorses it.

The NET rankings is a better system than anything college basketball had before. But it is time to update the system, likely by overhauling the quadrant system in a way that reward the biggest wins in a more meaningful way.

NCAA Tournament expansion

Some who have become numb to discussion about the Selection Committee and NET rankings over recent years picked out a new target for ridicule this postseason. Perhaps, they suggested, the wacky outcomes were a pre-built excuse to justify NCAA Tournament expansion in the future.

This theory likely lands somewhere between conspiracy theory and plausible idea on the chart of reality. However, it is a narrative the NCAA and high-major conference commissioners will face until the inevitable decision.

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey faced plenty of publish backlash when he weighed in on expansion.

“We are giving away highly competitive opportunities for automatic qualifiers, and I think that pressure is going to rise as we have more competitive basketball leagues at the top end because of expansion,” said Sankey, in an interview with ESPN’s Pete Thamel.

Sankey later classified the inference that he was only focused on getting more high-major bids as an ‘overread’ to The Athletic’s Kyle Tucker.

Similar frustration boiled over in college football this postseason, when Florida State was left out of the College Football Playoff. Was it a conspiracy? No. But is the decision easier to explain by pointing to the fact it will not happen in a 12-team format? Sure.

When Oklahoma gets left out because five bid-stealers destroyed what should have been the bubble, it does not mean there is some grand plan at work behind the scenes. But it does create a frustrating worry that almost certainly leads to confirmation bias in the end.