BRACKETOLOGY: Reaction

Now that the tournament field is set, I think the committee did a great job. There are a few seeding issues, but there always are and as you can see, I pretty much agreed with the selections. I picked 64/65 correctly and would've had 65/65 had I not had the last minute change of heart on Arkansas (See Sunday MORNING'S bracket compared to Sunday EVENING'S). I do have some issues with the liberal media and some fans about three teams that got in and some that didn't.

The three teams in question are Xavier, Stanford and Arkansas. I will break this down right now.

Xavier had some really bad losses. Xavier also went 3-2 against the RPI Top-50 and 12-5 against the RPI Top-100. The Musketeers were 9-1 in their last 10 and had a winning road record. Among Xavier's quality wins were Virginia Commonwealth, Villanova, Kansas St, Illinois and George Washington.

I've heard people whining that Stanford shouldn't be in because they only had 18 wins. I've heard people whining that Stanford didn't finish well. I've heard people whining that Stanford shouldn't get in because they played in the Pac-10. Out of the 30 games the Cardinal played, 21 of them were against the RPI Top-100. Every one of their losses came against the Top-100-NO bad losses. Among their wins...@ Virginia (4 seed), Texas Tech (10 seed), Washington St (3 seed), USC (5 seed), UCLA (2 seed), Oregon (3 seed). The Pac-10 was the third rated conference too.

I changed my mind on Arkansas at the last minute because I felt as though putting them gave too much credit to the conference tournament and devalued what happened in the regular season. There are only two teams who have a legitimate beef on this: Drexel and Florida St.

The two most vocal teams seem to be Kansas St and Syracuse and I think this is caused by ignorance of fans and of the media. The committee has set specific guidelines for what teams need to do to prove they're on of the 34 best at-large teams. Kansas St and Syracuse didn't do that. I have NO problem with Arkansas being in over them and here's why:

The biggest argument against Arkansas being out of the tournament is the fact that they were 7-9 in the SEC and were in the weaker of the two divisions. Out of 16 conference games, Arkansas had 3 games versus teams outside of the RPI top-100. Syracuse had 6 and Kansas St had 7. This is not 1997, it's 2007 and things are different. We have unbalanced schedules in conferences which means 10-6 in the Big East and Big 12 may not be as attractive to the committee as 7-9 or 8-8 in another conference. When you play the kind of schedule in-conference as Syracuse and K-State did, you better schedule tough out-of-conference. Oh yeah...that's right; Syracuse out-of-conference strength of schedule was 122 and K-State's was 227. Arkansas was 35 and they went 11-3 against it including wins over Southern Illinois and West Virginia. Arkansas played 22 games against the top-100...Syracuse played 16 and K-State played 13. You want to play those schedules, you better make sure you don't lose to teams who didn't even make the NIT like K-State and Syracuse did. Syracuse and K-State simply did not do enough.

Personally, I would've put Drexel in because they did everything the committee would ask of a team: Schedule tough out-of conference, win on the road, beat quality opponents. That's what Drexel did. They got punished for not performing well against the top 3 teams in their league. Two-thirds of Division-I would've performed worst than Drexel did. Tough break for Drexel, but I'm not as mad about it as I was about Hofstra and Cincinnati not getting in last year.

I'll move on to the actual bracket tomorrow.