I said this:
Naturally, this begs the question of what we should do instead.
The problem’s in the very term “selection,” isn’t it? True, the NCAA’s decision making body doesn’t really carry that name. It’s not the selection committee, it’s the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee. But we say Selection Sunday and “the selection show,” and we’ve done so for years.
No one bats an eye when we say “selection” because we’re using the term accurately with regard to the NCAA tournament. Selection’s precisely what is happening. Selection is exactly what should not occur, however, in anything rightly understood as sports. Selection renders that which is being selected a passive vessel.
In other sports, teams make the playoffs or qualify for the Champions League. We even talk like this in college basketball when we see teams win their conference tournaments. What we call an “automatic bid” is a euphemism for mere sports normalcy.
Instead of selecting teams in March we should choose criteria in May.
It could look like this in real time:
Later today, in the usual NCAA style (which is to say without prior murmur and under a seemingly innocuous headline at NCAA.org), the powers that be in Indianapolis announce that the 2026 tournament will be the last one where the field’s selected and seeded by the Men’s Basketball Committee. The same piece announces that the NCAA is partnering with the NABC to formulate criteria for making the tournament.
NABC executive director Craig Robinson is quoted as follows: “The NABC first proposed the idea of an intercollegiate national championship for basketball in 1938 and brought the idea to the NCAA. We funded the tournament initially out of our own coffers. We’re proud to partner with the NCAA and carry this stewardship forward as one of our nation’s most beloved sporting events enters a new era.”
The NCAA-NABC task force gets together that offseason and develops an initial set of postseason qualifying criteria. After the 2024-25 national champion is crowned, the task force reveals the 2025 field as it would have looked with the new method.
Based on the resulting comments, changes are made to the criteria. After the completion of the 2026 tournament, that field as it would have existed is posted at NCAA.org along with an accompanying note saying this is what we’re doing for 2027. Play accordingly.
At 6:00 Eastern on the morning following the first day of the regular season in November 2026, the NCAA posts the actual tournament rankings. This is done every day for the rest of the season. Teams know their exact position at all times. Who are the four No. 1 seeds? We’ll know, every day from November to Bracket Draft Sunday.
When moving to a any new method, it’s natural for interest to focus on nuts and bolts. Certainly, a simple win proxy built by NCAA partner Google atop the NCAA’s own NET rankings would be one possibility. Proxies are agnostic on a given game’s margin of victory and instead assign a weight to each win based on opponent strength and game location.
That being said, this intense interest in field-building mechanics is insufficient by itself on two fronts.
First, when the task at hand is naming 36 at-large teams, we vastly and indeed almost exponentially overstate the potential for divergence between different methods. Any coherent and feasible system is going to agree to an uncommon extent with other such methods. The Venn diagram in this instance is an array of virtually concentric circles all directly on top of one another.
Second and in the spirit of political economy, there’s a case to be made that any realistic a priori method that can win the assent of the NCAA and the coaching profession will by definition be a worthy way to build the field. The tournament is the NCAA’s cash cow. Coaches see their careers rise and fall on tournament success. These are the interested parties.
There’s little or no reason to assume that in the 2020s these two interested parties can’t build a win proxy or similar screening device to their specs. Once they do, we can revisit it and refine it after every tournament and quite possibly not give it much thought the rest of the year.
As is so often is the case with items wearing the NCAA brand in the 21st century, the venerable institution that is the selection committee is the end product of an incremental history that very easily could have taken a different turn. The NCAA’s basketball championship was created originally in reaction to and competition with the National Invitation tournament.
When Madison Square Garden impresario Ned Irish was picking teams for his new NIT in the 1930s and 1940s, he wanted to fill seats. Teams could accept the invitation or not as they pleased. (Yes, that’s similar to what happens now with NIT invites.)
This same low-stakes spirit infused the making of NCAA tournament fields until the early 1950s, when for the first time member institutions were required to choose either of the two competing events but not both. Many programs generally preferred the NIT up through the 1960s.
Though the NCAA’s basketball committee came into being after a fashion in the 1960s, the critical fork in this road came in the 1970s. The NCAA wasn’t simply hosting a playoff for conference champions and a few “independents” anymore. It’s no accident that the RPI was developed at a moment when NCAA bids were no longer viewed as low-value discretionary items and were instead coming to be seen as as do-or-die golden tickets.
For the first time the NCAA was saying in effect: We’ve got this. We’re going to select teams in a committee room based on our high degree of basketball knowledge.
This is where we’ve been ever since. It’s high time to move away from both the 1960s-vintage committee and its long risible 1970s-vintage pose of specialized expertise.
We don’t select teams in sports. We set the standard and watch what happens.
John Gasaway 