‘Whet the appetite:’ Saturday’s list of top 16 seeds promotes NCAA Tourney, but it’s subject to change
With Selection Sunday more than a month away, Saturday’s announcement of a preliminary list of the top 16 seeds is subject to change, the chair of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Committee said Wednesday.
Bernard Muir, the athletic director at Stanford, said that in the first two years of such announcements, four of the 32 teams ranked in February fell out of the top 16 on Selection Sunday. Of the three teams who fell out of the top 16 from February to March last year, two became No. 5 seeds and the other ended up a No. 10 seed, he said.
“This illustrates how much can happen from now until the end of the season,” Muir said on a teleconference.
The obvious follow-up question: If the list is fluid, why announce the top 16 on Saturday? (The announcement will be made at 12:30 p.m. on CBS leading into the network’s coverage of the Kentucky-Mississippi State game.)
“We were hearing from many folks within college basketball circles, within the landscape, saying, ‘Boy, we yearn for more information, more transparency,” Muir said. “This is an attempt to provide that a little bit early. Whet the appetite. Because we know Selection Sunday is so special.
“It also gives us a great practice in preparing for that special moment.”
The NCAA Men’s Basketball Committee (a.k.a. the Selection Committee) is in Indianapolis Tuesday through Thursday of this week for its annual orientation meeting. UK Director of Athletics Mitch Barnhart is on the committee.
The committee will decide on a preliminary list of the top 24 seeds, Muir said. But only the top 16 will be revealed Saturday. Of those 16, the committee is settled on the top eight, he said.
This year marks the first time the committee will use the NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET), which uses more modern analytics than the former measurement guide, the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI).
In trying to inhibit teams from running up scores, the NET caps the margin of victory at 10 points. A questioner pointed out that Virginia Tech Coach Buzz Williams called timeout with 30 seconds to go in a recent game in order to try to set up a play to reduce his team’s deficit under 10 points.
Not necessary, Muir said. “There’s a thousand possessions that occur over the course of a year,” he said. “Coming down to one possession is not going to adjust your NET that significantly. . . . What matters is who won the game and how did they do and where the game was played.”
The NCAA previewed the NET in November. The rating of several teams, including Kentucky at No. 61, created a buzz, a caller said in prefacing the question.
“Putting it mildly,” Muir said with a chuckle.
When asked what level of amusement the buzz surrounding the first NET created with committee members, Muir said, “Well, we did hear from some folks expressing concerns. But we knew all along even if you were to release the RPI early in the season, you would see some teams you didn’t expect to see so high on the rankings.”
Through games on Tuesday, Kentucky was No. 5 in the updated NET.
“It’s starting to sort itself out,” Muir said. “We’ll see some more changes as we get closer to conference tournament play. So the NET is doing exactly what we thought it would be doing. So we weren’t too concerned about the angst that people were showing.”
This story was originally published February 6, 2019 at 2:07 PM.
