Selection Sunday has 3 major problems

There might not be an unofficial holiday on the sports calendar that captivates the nation the way Selection Sunday does. Sure, the Super Bowl is a bigger deal because it’s the day that America crowns the champion of its most favorite sport (and because money, money, money), but college basketball’s big day demands just as much attention and generates nearly as much buzz, just for different reasons. It’s a very The Godfather-The Godfather Part II situation.

As glorious as the day the brackets are unveiled is, like everything else in the world outside of Starburst jelly beans, it is not perfect. There are a handful of problems that detract, in varying degrees, from the splendor of Selection Sunday, three of which loom larger than all others. The good news is that there is a relatively easy fix for all three.

Put simply, these games are a huge hindrance toward the NCAA Tournament selection committee from doing its job to the best of its ability. When your job is putting together a tournament that a group of people paid $10.8 billion for the right to televise a few years ago, that’s sort of a big deal.

Three of college basketball’s top conferences -- the SEC, Big Ten and the Atlantic 10 -- will crown their champions on Sunday, and those championships will have shorter windows of relevance than any of the ones that came before them this NCAA postseason. Every year, the Big Ten champions appear on the CBS Selection Show still wearing their uniforms and clutching their hard-earned trophy. Every year the fans of that team have already shifted their full attention to the next game before the players have had the chance to take a shower. It doesn’t seem fair.

“We would celebrate it, we would enjoy it and as soon as we got onto the bus, Coach K would look at us all and say, ‘Next play -- it’s time to get focused on the NCAA tournament,’” former Duke star Jay Williams recently told The Fayetteville Observer. “Now, with the (ACC) tournament ending on a Saturday, it actually allows a team to take a break for a second and enjoy the accomplishment. I never got a chance to really sit back and enjoy the accomplishment because you were moving on to the next goal.”

Thanks to the mock selection process that the committee does with the media every year, we know that it likes to have all the teams selected and seeded by the night before Selection Sunday. The committee essentially has a full bracket in place by Saturday night, and only has a couple of variations in place in the event that something extreme happens.

Basically, in the grand scheme of things, the championship games on Sunday rarely matter at all. For example, look at what one selection committee told ESPN 680 (Louisville) radio show host Jason Anderson during the mock selection process back in February.

So a Kentucky team which many believed was underseeded as it was at a No. 8 seed, would have received absolutely no benefit from beating the tournament’s No. 1 overall on a neutral court? That should be all the evidence you need to know that something is extremely wrong here.

And then what about a situation like the one the committee will see this year when a Connecticut team playing on Sunday can only crash the field of 68 with a win -- less than an hour before the bracket is released (the AAC championship game tip time is slotted for 3:15 p.m. ET). That’s a situation that would seem to complicate things to a degree where you’d like to have another 18 hours or so to make sure you get the whole thing right. Instead, the victorious Huskies will likely be hastily slotted in a place they don’t necessarily fit, and a place they wouldn’t be if the committee had ample time to adjust.

In 2011, everyone was in agreement that Colorado was playing for their NCAA Tournament lives in the Pac-12 tournament. So when the Buffaloes won the title and essentially “stole” a bid from a potential at-large team, how could they possibly be seeded 11th and better than the final four other at-large squads? The subjective claims of “team X should have been seeded higher” or “team Y should have been in the field” types of mistakes are going to be made every year, but there are other mistakes that we’ve seen from the committee over the past decade that are simply inexcusable for a situation where there’s so much at stake.

Two seasons ago, fifth-seeded UNLV was forced to play a de facto away game against No. 12 seed California in San Jose. All the committee needed to do to rectify the unfair situation was flip the Bears with fellow 12-seed Akron. In a more infamous gaffe, the committee once mistakenly placed BYU, a Mormon-run school, in a situation where it might have to play a game on a Sunday.

This stuff is easily correctable, and you’d like to think the people tasked with the assignment could handle it if given an extra day to discuss and examine. The issue, however, seems to be that folks want something to watch in the hours leading up to the bracket reveal.

“It’s a no-brainer for the fans because they get to watch great games, and for the networks because Sunday games are always the highest-rated,” said CBS’ Seth Davis. “It’s not changing anytime soon.”

But isn’t the NCAA Tournament -- the event that is college basketball to the majority of the sports world -- more important than a handful of games that are going to be forgotten hours or, in the case of the Big Ten and the AAC, minutes later?

If viewers and networks are that desperate for pre-bracket hoops, then why not move some of the smaller Saturday championship games that get overshadowed by the power conferences over to Sunday? A hoops-hungry nation is going to watch anything you put on TV that day, and those games figure to have far less of an impact on the committee’s job than the ones currently on the Selection Sunday docket.

People are going to tune into the main event on Selection Sunday regardless of what the opening act is. That being the case, there needs to be more of an emphasis on the big show being as close to flawless as it can possibly be.

SB Nation presents: Three reasons why Kentucky will go undefeated

All members of the NCAA Tournament selection committee are given a “cheat sheet” on each of the teams that have earned automatic bids to the big dance or that are still in play for at-large bid consideration. The star of this cheat sheet is the Ratings Percentage Index, or RPI. Each team’s mini-profile includes its own RPI, its record in games against teams with a top-50 RPI, and the RPI of the teams that make up its “bad losses.”

The problem with this is that the RPI is a primitive, outdated metric which has overstayed its welcome by about a decade.

There are three items which make up a team’s RPI: 50 percent of it is the team’s opponents’ winning percentage, 25 percent of it is the team’s own winning percentage and the other 25 percent of it is the team’s opponents’ opponents’ winning percentage. When it was introduced in 1981, the RPI was revolutionary. By modern standards, however, this is a remarkably simple formula and one which can be easily manipulated.

This season features the strongest cast of potential No. 1 seeds in recent memory. For instance, Arizona is 31-3, hasn’t lost since Feb. 7, dominated the Pac-12 regular season and tournament, and is still virtually a lock to earn a No. 2 seed.

Nowhere in the discussion for a No. 1 seed are the Kansas Jayhawks, a team that was handed its eighth loss of the season by Iowa State in the Big 12 Tournament title game on Saturday. The Jayhawks’ national ranking: a totally reasonable No. 9. The Jayhawks’ RPI: a totally unreasonable No. 2.

Year after year, no program manipulates the RPI system better than Kansas (and that’s not a knock on them at all). Knowing the way the formula works, the Jayhawks perennially make their schedule so that it includes a few high-profile national powers, and a bunch of low and mid-major teams that figure to rack up high win totals by dominating their conferences. It’s a method that had Kansas as the No. 1 RPI team in the country in late January, sitting one spot ahead of a Kentucky team it lost to by 32 on a neutral floor. There are a number of other examples (hey, Buffalo at No. 30) of this phenomenon, but Kansas is really all you need to drive home the point here.

The committee has attempted to downplay the importance of the RPI on its process in recent years, but the fact of the matter is that every person in that room has those numbers in front of them, and no other advanced formula numbers. And that’s the thing, there are so many modern metrics like Ken Pomeroy’s out there with proven accuracy rates that are far superior to the RPI. Not only does the committee look stubborn for refusing to embrace these advances, it looks like a group that doesn’t put enough emphasis on doing the best job it could possibly do.

There isn’t a sport more defined by its postseason than college basketball, which claims not only to have the most exciting way to crown a champion, but the most democratic. Every team (in theory) gets to play until it loses, which is fantastic, but it’s not like the regular season has zero impact on all of this. The teams that have done the best work over the course of the past four months are rewarded by the tournament’s selection committee with the easiest potential paths to the national championship. Teams that may have hit their strides later in the season still have a chance to be in the field and prove their worth, but there still have to be ramifications for their early season struggles, and thus they are given more difficult roads to the national championship.

It’s a beautiful system, but it only works if the highest premium is placed on the tournament being concocted in as fair a fashion as possible. As of right now, that isn’t being done.

A few years ago, the NCAA made the decision to abandon the old “S-Curve” method of bracketing (winding down in an “S” pattern so that the No. 1 overall seed is in a region with the worst No. 2 seed, the best No. 3 seed, the worst No. 4 seed, and so on) in favor of seeding the tournament’s top teams based on geography.

This is all well and fine if we’re just talking about the No. 1 seeds, which have earned the right to play close to home and deserve to be protected, but the committee does this with all teams seeded 1-4. Basically, if you’re the top No. 2 seed, instead of being automatically assigned to the bracket of the weakest No. 1 seed, you’re automatically assigned to the region that is the closest to you geographically. The same system is in place for seeds 3 and 4.

As you might expect, this has led to some extremely unbalanced regions in recent years.

A season ago, Wichita State became the first team since 1991 to enter the NCAA Tournament with an unblemished record, and was rightfully rewarded with a No. 1 seed. The committee’s rankings of all 68 teams later revealed that the Shockers were regarded as the No. 3 overall team in the tournament, meaning they should have been assigned a region with the second-strongest No. 2 and No. 4 seeds, and the third-strongest No. 3 seed. Instead, Gregg Marshall’s team was dealt the remarkably unfair hand of being in the same region as the tournament’s best No. 3 and No. 4 seeds (Michigan and Louisville), and its second-best No. 2 seed (Duke). Toss in preseason No. 1 (and eventual national runner-up) Kentucky as a remarkably under-seeded No. 8, and you have one of the most unfairly stacked regions in the history of the NCAA Tournament.

In 2013, eventual national champion Louisville was named as the tournament’s overall No. 1 seed, the team more deserving of protection than any of the other 67 in the field. Instead, the Cardinals were assigned to the same region as a Duke team that most experts believed was going to be a No. 1 seed itself, as well as the tournament’s third-strongest No. 3 and No. 4 seeds (Michigan State and Saint Louis). So the overall No. 1 seed was given a region where none of the other top four seeds were the weakest teams on their line. If your goal is to set up the most fair tournament possible based on the results of the previous five months, there is simply no way to justify this.

We could be headed for similar outrage in 2015.

Wisconsin is widely regarded as one of the three best teams in college basketball, and perhaps the squad best-equipped to take down undefeated and soon-to-be No. 1 overall seed Kentucky. Still, regardless of how the Badgers fare in Sunday’s Big Ten championship game (throwback to problem No. 1), there is a very real chance that they will wind up on the tournament’s second line.

If Bo Ryan’s team is a No. 2 seed, it’s more than likely that they will be the top No. 2 seed, or (if you’re into looking at it this way) the tournament’s No. 5 overall team. With the committee’s method of geographical preference in play, the Badgers would be assigned to the Midwest Region -- the same region where Kentucky will be the top seed.

If the situation does play out like this, it won’t be fair to anyone associated with either program, or to the fans of the sport. It’s also a phenomenon that’s going to keep occurring year after year until the emphasis is placed back where it should be: creating the most fair tournament possible.