The good news on Selection Monday 2025 is that when it comes to building a tournament field the NCAA men’s basketball committee is much sounder in its workings than it was previously. The process has become so rational and predictable that we are all bracketologists now. You or I or someone who hasn’t seen a single game can identify 36 of 37 at-large teams in advance with wins above bubble.

As one who in the past devoted thousands of words to what I found to be the unsound workings of previous committees, I don’t wish to minimize this good news. In fact within the narrow confines of a foundational premise to the effect that “the committee still exists in 2025,” I’m here to applaud.

WAB is the way. It tells us how well you did at winning the games you played. At one stroke it nullifies entirely that malicious contagion of evaluative mayhem known as quadrants. (The NCAA should put quadrants out of their misery this morning with an official “never mind, our bad” statement.) If we are to have a committee, that group should absolutely be doing what this group just did.

Still, the bad news is the committee’s very existence continues to do abject harm to every moment of basketball that occurs right up to the selection show. This isn’t about selecting teams for the tournament, which we can and should and apparently will do from now on with WAB whether there’s a committee or not. This is about the sport itself and its entire season.

Why wait until mid-March to use WAB? Let’s identify the 37 at-large teams from the first day of the season in November. We’ll have a “real” bracket every day. We’ll know the impact of each shocking upset in real time.

The 1960s-era jury-and-verdict model of selection is not only archaic and needless, it’s draining the drama from the regular season and particularly from conference tournaments. If we had known the exact stakes day by day and game by game last week for West Virginia, Xavier, Ohio State, and Indiana, it would have been incredible.

As for seeding we can do whatever the committee decides. Use this metric or that one or an artisanal blend of several. This question will be approached as an analytical matter of high moment when really it’s procedural and experimental. Any coherent field will exhibit asymptotic overlap with the alternatives. Use whatever you wish and make that determination in advance.

But please for Naismith’s sake do not lose hours of your life in a room bristling with charts and graphs and KenPom and the NET dissecting and agonizing over Xavier and North Carolina versus West Virginia and Boise State. Going through these motions after the fact is just performative metaphysics.

We don’t need metaphysics. This is sports. There is not and can never be one right answer to Xavier versus West Virginia. There are better and worse arguments, but these are questions we should decide in a team-blind manner before the first game of the season.

Instead we have a committee repeating the lion’s share of what a sound metric already tells us. Then with edge cases we’re treated to abstruse and unintentionally comic exegeses on which players missed which games against which opponents. Imagine the NBA doing this. Would the Mavericks get a waiver this year to go to the playoffs?

Elaborate contortions to count basketball angels on the head of an injury-list pin only serve to anesthetize what should be an electric February and Champ Week. We can have genuine bubble drama weeks in advance of the tournament. The battle for the No. 1 seeds will be nip and tuck and very real all season long because we’ll know the actual bracket.

To the committee we should all say thank you and well done on the WAB front. Also this “make these determinations in advance” plan is a good idea and it would have worked too if it weren’t for you meddling adults.

Our deep sports urge to meddle is fine and natural and ubiquitous. We all feel the need, but across the broad and sunny uplands of zero-committee sports our itch is scratched with mere commentary. We certainly don’t expect actual ex post facto decisions on whether Darian DeVries will take his team to the tournament.

Last season the Minnesota Vikings were 14-3 and all that got them was an opening playoff game on the road. An NFL selection committee would have meddled with gusto and said oh no, no, no, we can’t have this. Happily there is no committee. The NFL makes these determinations in advance. You’re 14-3 and playing on the road in the Wild Card? Well, hard cheese, old chap. You knew the rules.

When we do our meddling in advance it will be a good day for the tournament, a better day for the season, and a new day for the sport. The committee should do its work in May and not March.