Presenting The Stat Geek Mock Bracket Selection Committee

February 16, 2012 - by David Hess

As they’ve done each February for the past few years, the NCAA has invited a couple dozen members of the media to Indianapolis for a mock selection committee exercise.

The participants will go through roughly the same process that the real committee does, including all the steps from selection to seeding to bracketing. They’ll be fed simulated conference tournament winners to mimic the surprise winners we’ll see in March, and they’ll end up with a mock bracket that they’ll release to the public.

Because I’m jealous of the writers that get to participate, and because I thought perhaps the analytics community could do a better job than the media, I decided to organize a rival mock event involving some of my favorite numbers-oriented writers and stat heads.

Without further ado, I present to you the Stat Geek Mock Selection Committee.

Stat Geek Mock Selection Committee Members

Because I wasn’t sure how many positive responses I’d get, I over-invited a bit, and we actually ended up with one more full member than the real committee:

Drew Cannon of Basketball Prospectus (@DrewCannon1)
Andy Cox of Crashing The Dance (@crashthedance)
David Hess of TeamRankings (@AudacityOfHoops) [Me! And, I’ll call myself the Committee Chair]
Evan Jacoby of Rush The Court (@evanjacoby)
Monte McNair of Outside the Hashes (@OTH_blog)
CJ Moore of Need I Say Moore? and Basketball Prospectus (@cjmoore4)
Daniel M of D Stats (@DSMok1)
Michael Portscheller of Big Ten Geeks (@bigtengeeks)
Corey Schmidt of Basketball Prospectus (@cjscmhidt1)
John Templon of Big Apple Buckets (@nybuckets)
Nathan Walker of The Basketball Distribution (@bbstats)
John Ezekowitz of Harvard Sports Analysis Collective (@JohnEzekowitz) [partial participant, time constraints]

Goal Of The Stat Geek Committee

Let’s get this out of the way right up front: We are NOT trying to mimic the media’s bracket.

The NCAA selection committee principles and procedures specify that the goal of the committee is to select the best 37 at large teams, and seed all 68 teams from best to worst.

That’s it.

There’s no instruction to only pay attention to wins and losses. There’s no rule that says a committee member must even glance at the RPI — though it is plastered all over every team comparison sheet the real committee receives.

We’ll be following the same directive — but I’d bet we’ll be going about it in a much different way. I’ll leave it to each of the individual committee members to write about how exactly the determined which teams to vote for. Best rest assured, there have been very few mentions of the RPI in our virtual meeting room (i.e. our email threads).

The Process And Plan

We’re trying to follow the procedures as closely as possible. But because we’re not able to devote as much time to this as the mock media committee is, we’ll have to take a couple shortcuts.

The real selection committee selects and seeds the teams based on a series of votes, where they either pick the best 8 teams from a list, or rank 8 teams from best to worst. We’ll be mimicking this, just at an increased scale and pace. Instead of picking just 8 teams at a time, we’ll pick a much larger number. And instead of ranking 8 at a time, we’ll rank many more. The basic principles are the same, but we’ll be speeding it up.

Our plan is to also try to use the same automatic bids that the media’s mock committee uses, as that should help with comparisons between our two brackets. We’ll be relying on our highly-compensated (with thank you emails) moles to leak the mock conference tournament winners to us, and we’ll slot them into our bracket accordingly.

Still, because we’ll be working over email, and with late info, we can’t hope to release our bracket simultaneously. Instead, our aim is to have ours out by the day after the media’s mock selection meeting is finished. I believe that puts us on schedule for a Saturday release.

So, mark your calendars, and get ready to marvel about how much more fundamentally sound our bracket is than the media. Or, prepare to rip us to shreds for not paying enough attention to wins and losses. To be honest, I have no idea how this will turn out.

That’s what makes it so fun.

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