Inside The Bracket - January 22, 2018
- Excited to release my first bracket of the Regular Season. It has been a fun season already. I have had the pleasure to see teams from the Pac-12, Big 10, WCC, MAC, WAC, and NEC in person. And many more games to come. My goal is to see some of these teams first hand, especially potential bubble teams, to help make more accurate bracket projections.
- The NCAA Tournament Selection Committee has new Team Sheet criteria in place for this March. The selection committee will no longer use top 50, top 100, 200 and 201 and above as dividing categories. Instead, the new terminology is quadrants 1, 2, 3 and 4. The decision is to get away from treating every team the same if the game was on the road, neutral or at home based on their power rating. Now the road/neutral games matter more.
- Quick review for anyone unfamiliar. The actual NCAA committee will submit list ballots to the committee chairman throughout the seeding process, which eventually takes a pool of the top eight teams left on the board to select four teams per seed line. Since I am doing this on my own, I will take my highest eight teams for each seed line and do a full comparison on all eight, and select the top four. The remaining four stay in the mix for the next seed line down. This repeats itself until I get to the last four At Large selections. At that point I evaluate all "bubble" teams, typically a pool of 12-15 teams to select the last four teams. This will vary based on how the bubble is shaping up, for example certain times I may take a large pool of teams to determine any of the last 4-8 spots.
- For The Bracketeer's Automatic Bid projections the following tiebreakers are used: 1) Head to Head 2) KenPom Rating if Head to Head does not suffice.
Seed List 1-68
