The NCAA on Monday announced some adjustments in its selection and seeding principles, including giving the selection committee the leeway to compare borderline teams in the field before determining which ones end up in Dayton.
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Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione, chair of the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee for 2015-16, said the change will allow for all teams to go through the “scrubbing” process the decision-makers use to place teams throughout the field on the proper seed lines. That entails comparing each team to the others with similar resumes before ranking the teams from No. 1 to 68.
Here’s the NCAA’s explanation:
This year, there were six teams seeded as No. 11s — Texas, UCLA and First Four participants Ole Miss, BYU, Boise State and Dayton. In theory, under the new principles, Ole Miss might have been deemed to have a superior ranking to UCLA and thus might avoid being sent to the First Four.
“It’s a small, yet significant, alteration to the language outlining our seeding process,” Castiglione said in a statement. “… Scrubbing is comparing two teams against one another and sometimes there’s greater clarity during that process due to head-to-head competition, record versus common opponents or wins against tournament teams. This tweak provides us with the opportunity to scrub teams even more thoroughly.”
Under the revised guidelines, the committee also will be able to slide the top No. 2 seed — the fifth-best team in the field — out of its natural geographic area to avoid placing it in the same region as the No. 1 overall seed.
