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Is It Getting Better?

I was thinking about the tournament the other day -- I seem to be doing that more these days than I used to, which is an interesting case of my readers shaping my thinking rather than the other way around -- and it occurred to me that a lot of the problems I used to write about in the selection process aren't as bad as they used to be. The RPI still honks, and that by itself throws off the seeding and placement process rather badly at times, but as far as the all-important question of who gets in and who doesn't even get a chance goes, the issues of unearned bids for cold-weather teams and exclusion of mid-level major conference teams have gotten steadily better. In order to test this thought, I threw together the following chart showing the errors (for my value of "error" anyway; these are loosely ISR-based) for the years of the 64-team tournament:

Despite my optimism, the raw numbers of bad bids haven't changed much over the years. For all that the West Coast teams justifiable anger is misaimed at the SEC (I can't imagine how bad that's going to get if ten SEC teams do manage to get in this year, and you could actually make a legitimate case for eleven at the moment), the biggest problem continues to be RPI-based bids for mid-major Southeastern conferences -- last year was especially bad with five of them. The one source of optimism, though, is that we're essentially down to a single cause now. Assuming that the .500 rule is going to stay, the single remaining campaign issue for those of us who care is that the RPI has to go.

This means absolutely nothing, ignore it.

This is one generic layman's predictions for who gets in the tournament. I'm not going to bother picking a team from the one-bid conferences, since the conference tournament will just be a crapshoot, but if I only list one team from a conference, they'll get an at large bid if they don't get the automatic bid.

America East  Brigham Young         Coastal Carolina     Alabama
A10           Oral Roberts          Long Beach State     Auburn
Big East      Miami, Florida        Cal State Fullerton  Vanderbilt
CAA           Florida State         Cal Poly             Tennessee
Horizon       North Carolina        Oregon State         Mississippi State
MAAC          North Carolina State  Stanford             Northwestern State
MAC           Georgia Tech          Arizona State        Wichita State
MEAC          Clemson               Washington           East Carolina
Ivy           Central Florida       Arizona              Tulane
NEC           Texas                 Southern California  Southern Mississippi
OVC           Texas A&M             California           Texas Christian
Patriot       Nebraska              Louisiana State      College of Charleston
SWAC          Texas Tech            Mississippi          Georgia Southern
Rice          Baylor                South Carolina       Pepperdine
Nevada        Missouri              Florida              San Francisco
Illinois      Winthrop              Arkansas             Louisiana-Lafayette

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 Moore and Redwine counts are corrections based on actual counts.

(*) Pitch count is estimated.

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Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Is It Getting Better?

About the author, Boyd Nation