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The Way the World Should Be

I'm going to go all Andy Rooney on you this week. Instead of continuing with the Kremlin-watching aspects of our sport and trying to predict what the selection committee will do, I'm going to tell you what the field would look like in Boyd's World. They'll have the advantage of knowing what will happen in the next two weeks by the time they make their choices, but I have the advantage of knowing the following things, so I'm willing to bet my list is better than theirs in the end.

• The RPI doesn't work, and should be tossed in favor of something more accurate like the ISR's or Ken Massey's ratings.

• .500 is a silly, arbitrary distinction. The tournament is too big at 64 teams, but since it's that big, some of the properly qualifying teams are going to play schedules tough enough that they'll finish at or below .500. We want teams to play tough schedules; punishing them for doing so is then silly.

• The conference season is just a subset of the whole season, and the difference of a game or two in that subset means a lot less than the whole mass of evidence. I'll look at conference standings if the preferred rating period is essentially a tossup, but leaving a team out because they're behind a lesser team in the conference standings is just totemic.

My rules for selection are simple. Finish first in your conference (there are no conference tournaments except perhaps for the SEC and Big 12 in Boyd's World; we'd think about getting rid of automatic bids, but I think we'd keep them while possibly reintroducing playin rounds) or be one of the best remaining 34 teams, and you're in. For conferences with divisions, I just picked one. Near the margins for the at large bids and around the boundaries between the seeding tiers, I looked at conference standings, head-to-head results, and mitigating factors in cases where the ISR's were unclearly close. I'm not listing sites, because I don't care; despite the general home field advantage, there's not enough evidence to know if it matters here (it may just be that the home field advantage is due to batting last, which is negated in the postseason) and no evidence that home teams win regionals more often than they should.

In bold for those intent on missing it: This is not a prediction; this is what should happen and won't. Regionals are listed in seed order with ISR rankings for reference:

  1 Stanford                         14 South Carolina
 33 Notre Dame                       19 Oregon State  
 32 Nebraska                         54 Birmingham-Southern
202 Southern                         55 College of Charleston

  2 Texas                            16 Arkansas
 30 Washington State                 18 Oklahoma
 34 UC Riverside                     49 Central Florida
197 Bethune-Cookman                  59 Minnesota

  3 Rice                             15 Arizona
 31 Texas Tech                       17 Florida
 35 Tulane                           44 UC Santa Barbara
173 LeMoyne                          74 George Mason

  4 Long Beach State                 12 Miami, Florida
 29 Florida State                    20 Vanderbilt
 36 San Diego                        45 North Carolina
155 Central Michigan                 76 South Alabama

  5 Arizona State                    13 UC Irvine
 28 Lamar                            21 Georgia
 37 Wichita State                    47 Auburn
139 Princeton                        81 Nevada-Las Vegas

  6 Washington                       11 Cal State Fullerton
 27 Oral Roberts                     22 Southern Mississippi
 38 Loyola Marymount                 43 Tennessee
135 Central Connecticut State        98 Austin Peay State

  7 Louisiana State                  10 East Carolina
 26 Virginia                         23 Georgia Tech
 39 Southern California              42 Baylor
130 Northeastern                    112 George Washington

  8 Texas A&M                         9 Mississippi
 25 UCLA                             24 Oklahoma State
 40 Cal Poly                         41 Clemson
127 Army                            123 Illinois-Chicago

Some surprises or points worth pondering:

• To my surprise, the SEC only deserves nine bids. The literal last spot came down to deciding between Auburn and Mississippi State; Auburn gets the nod, but those two are in tossup territory at the moment. A late collapse by someone nearby (say UNC or Baylor) could change that to where both teams deserve a spot, but it's not as clearcut as I thought.

• Birmingham-Southern and College of Charleston have been getting closer to each other over the last few weeks, to the point where they comprise the border between the #3 and #4 seeds.

• There's actually a Pac 10 team that doesn't deserve to be in the tournament.

• Overall, it's an even bigger year than usual for some of the power conferences, with the SEC, Pac 10, and Big 12 totalling 24 bids between them.

In keeping with what I've been doing since the conference seasons began, here are my predictions for who will actually get in as of this week:

Atlantic 10      Oral Roberts          Texas Tech             Arizona State
America East     Rice                  Baylor                 Washington
CAA              Wichita State         Minnesota              Arizona
Horizon          Florida State         Penn State             UCLA
Ivy              North Carolina        Notre Dame             Louisiana State
MAAC             Georgia Tech          Pittsburgh             Mississippi
MAC              Virginia              Birmingham-Southern    South Carolina
Mountain West    Clemson               Coastal Carolina       Florida
NEC              North Carolina State  UC Irvine              Arkansas
OVC              Central Florida       Long Beach State       Tennessee
Patriot          Florida Atlantic      Cal State Fullerton    Auburn
SWAC             Texas                 College of Charleston  Vanderbilt
Sun Belt         Texas A&M             Southern Mississippi   Georgia
WCC              Nebraska              East Carolina          Mississippi State
Bethune-Cookman  Oklahoma              Tulane                 Texas State
Miami            Oklahoma State        Stanford               Lamar

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you. This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have caught my eye -- the general threshold for listing is 120 actual pitches or 130 estimated, although short rest will also get a pitcher listed if I catch it. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.

The Hinchman correction is from an actual pitch count, showing that the estimator doesn't always go high when it misses.

(*) Pitch count is estimated.

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Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> The Way the World Should Be

About the author, Boyd Nation