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Right - the quads basically count a road win at, say, Vermont the same as one at Kansas. Caught Vermont's tournament championship game at home over the weekend. Scrappy team with some nice players. Probably would have blown Iowa out of the gym this year. But there's no way those road wins should be treated the same. (Again, not dissing the Catamounts. Maybe we'll see them at PBA in the NIT Elite Eight.) More tiers at the top, better metrics to go into it, and it may work. But this particular RPI-based quad system is bad, and the committee let it rule things too much. (Well, except with CU. The committee must've mis-read their 2 Q1 wins to give them an 8 seed, since every at-large Power them had more Q1 wins than they did, even all the at-large teams seeded below them, including St Bony with 3. But there's always a WTF team, right?) And the quad system doesn't help mid-majors at all. Thought I read somewhere that was part of the intent of implementing it, but if it was, the NCAA missed badly.

I think if Q1 and Q2 are all that matter, they need more tiers in that area to make it easier to compare teams. I broke down NU & Texas's Q1 wins in another thread somewhere. No idea where anymore. NU was 1-5 vs the upper half of Q1, Texas was 0-9 NU was 0-1 vs the bottom half of Q1, Texas was 6-2 It's a heck of a lot easier to beat a #70 RPI team on the road than a #10 RPI team, but they're both Q1 games, which makes the current quad breakdown very flawed and easier to game. I understand wanting to use quads to make it easier to compare teams. But it needs to be a combo of metrics, not just RPI, and we need more tiers at the top. EDIT: And I should add, I caught a couple of Stanford games this season. They're awful. Had no idea they would even be under consideration for the NIT. Them getting a #3 is a joke. But the eye test is not a part of any criteria anymore.

Stanford 2-10 Q1 6-1 Q2 Nebraska 1-6 Q1 2-3 Q2 These are the primary criteria they appeared to use throughout the NIT seedings.

I guess if Q1 and Q2 is all that matters and Q3 and Q4 are ignored, logic would say you need more tiers at the top and fewer at the bottom to make it easier to compare/separate out teams.

Agree with multiple posts above - the intent of our schedule was fine. Caught a lot of bad breaks, plus the middle of the B1G collapsing. All I'm saying is - as it turned out - we could've won 25 games and 15 league games, but unless those extra wins were Q1 games, it would've made no difference in the end. Just blows my mind - have to keep repeating it to make sure it sinks in that a 25-7/15-3 Big Ten team would've had essentially zero chance of making the NCAA Tournament as an at large. Our at large hopes were basically over - barring multiple double-digit 'dog road wins in league play - once the Big Ten got smoked in the B1G-ACC challenge.

Something else that made it next to impossible for us - our Q1 games were at the top of the range, rather than in the middle/bottom. Much tougher to beat the #10 RPI team on the road than the #70 RPI team. NU Q1 games Home games vs #5 and #12 (1-1) = all upper 1/2 of the 1-30 range Neutral vs #12 (0-1) = in upper 1/3 of 1-50 range Road games vs #9, #14, #20, and #44 (0-4) = all but CU in upper 1/3 of 1-75 range, and CU was still in the middle third So no games against teams in the lower part of the quadrant range - that's where the B1G really hurt us. Road games against teams like PSU, NW, Wisc, Minn all usually would be Q1, but not this year. Plus not getting a crack at PU, MSU or OSU at home. Just for fun, here's Tejas' Q1 games Home games vs #5, #12, #23, #26, and #27 (3-2) = with all 3 wins coming in the lower 1/2 of the 1-30 range Neutral vs #7, #21, #23, and #41 (1-3) = with win coming against lower 1/3 of the range Road vs #5, #23, #26, #27, #42, #49, #53, and #68 (2-6) = with both wins against middle 1/3 of the range So NU was 1-6 vs Q1, Tejas 6-11. Looks like Tejas was clearly better than NU. But when you look at just the upper half of those ranges (1-15 at home, 1-25 neutral and 1-37 on road): NU 1-5 Tejas 0-9 Now bottom half of the ranges NU 0-1 Tejas 6-2 Would NU have done better if it had received all of the opportunities in the lower half of Q1 like Tejas had - who knows? 5 of NU's Q1 opportunities came in conference, Tejas had 12. Certainly just one talking point, so it doesn't completely mean the quads are garbage. But this would indicate it matters in what part of the Q1 range you're playing teams. And it would indicate the committee didn't do much more than lazily glance at the Q1 number, rather than breaking it down any further - 1-6 vs 6-11 looks like a slam dunk for Tejas .... but 1-5 vs 0-9, not so much. When you're basing your system on a poor metric like RPI, you're going to get some garbage results from time to time.

Exactly. I'm just not sure why the committee made a show of "we watch X number of games live" or "this member watches this conference closely" when it's all about Q1. I guess they have to justify their existence. Maybe it's time to just use a formula like NCAA Hockey and let the formula pick & seed the teams - everyone knows what it is ahead of time, there's no mystery. Ha - that'll never happen.

Lots of good points - on #4 though, wins at PSU, UCF or St Johns would've done us no good. (Heck throw Illinois in there.) We could've won all those games, but they weren't Q1 wins, so they don't help us. With the way the committee handled it, Q1 wins and total Q1 games are what matters and little else. So you have to game the system - look for teams that should be in the RPI 55-70 range, and agree to go play them on the road. Figuring out which teams those will be probably is next to impossible, but that's one way. And instead of a home and home with Kansas, which is at the top of Q1, look for a team that's closer to the bottom of Q1 - since beating the #1 RPI team at home is treated the same as beating the #30 team, there's no point in beating your head against the wall vs the #1 team. Much easier said than done. Perhaps the best option is to find a mid-major who's good at gaming the RPI and schedule home and home with them. And agree completely on avoiding tournaments that have any high RPI one-bid league teams in them. Not sure how easy that is to do either though - not sure if the coaches get that kind of info. And it's probably easier for a school like Purdue to say no to that type of tournament than it is for NU, because they have other options.

Here's the Q1 and Q2 records of the NIT teams - looks like they basically looked at Q1 + Q2 wins and seeded off that for the P5 teams. Non-P5 teams were kind of slid in there somewhere, not sure exactly how they picked where to place them - it may have been mostly about where they could create interesting matchups - Temple/PSU, Boise/Washington, Louisiana/LSU, etc. It looks like if you had a lot of overall losses (LSU, Okla St) you were punished a couple of seed lines. And Notre Dame had the injury situation, so they're an outlier. Otherwise it pretty closely follows the number of Q1 + Q2 wins you had as a P5 team. #1 seeds Notre Dame 2-9 / 5-2 USC 4-6 / 5-4 Baylor 4-12 / 3-1 St Mary’s 2-1 / 2-2 #2 seeds Louisville 3-10 / 2-3 Maruqette 3-8 / 5-3 Oklahoma St 5-12 / 3-2 Utah 3-6 / 3-4 #3 seeds Oregon 3-5 / 5-4 Stanford 2-10 / 6-1 Mid Tenn 2-3 / 3-1 LSU 6-5 / 3-7 #4 seeds Penn St 3-8 / 2-2 W Kentucky 1-2 / 3-3 Boise St 2-3 / 5-2 Missi St 2-8 / 4-2 #5 seeds Temple 3-7 / 4-4 Boston Coll 2-13 / 3-2 Washington 3-5 / 2-4 NU 1-6 / 2-3 #6 seeds Rider 0-2 / 1-2 BYU 1-5 / 2-1 Vermont 0-4 / 2-1 Louisiana 0-1 / 1-2

Truly sad part is the metrics & guys like Lunardi had us OVER-seeded most of the time, since he had us in the first 4 out and next 4 out most of the past few weeks.

I don't think the intention of our schedule was that bad - we just caught a lot of tough breaks. Just for comparison, here's Purdue's non-con this year: (selected them as they had the highest NCAA seed out of the B1G and their schedule was organized a lot like ours with a neutral tourney & both BE and ACC challenge games) 7 buy games 3-game neutral tourney - Tennessee (L), W Ky (L), Ariz (W) - and remember Tennessee was picked like 11th in the SEC this year BE challenge Marquette (W) ACC challenge L'ville (W) in-state game Butler (W) Obviously a better schedule than ours, but they only played 3 NCAA teams, plus a couple bubble teams - their 2 bubble teams weren't their choice though, they were handed to them by the B1G. We played 2 NCAA teams and it would've been 3 if we beat UCF as we'd have drawn W Va We played 6 buy games Kansas Our 3-game tourney wasn't as quality, although if we had beaten UCF, it would've been better We were given who we got in the BE and ACC games In-state game Creighton They got very lucky that Tennessee played way over their expected rank and that Arizona fell to them in the 7th-place game of that tournament. So in the games where they chose who to play, they didn't really play a much different schedule than we did. To their credit, they took advantage of some scheduling breaks with Tennessee and Arizona and who the B1G gave them in the challenge games, won some big games, and turned it into a #2 seed with a strong league performance. We didn't do enough with the chances we had. But as far as who they chose to play versus who we chose to play in the non-con, not that different. And when you consider they are a senior-loaded team that spent the summer playing in the University Games, while we had a host of newcomers and didn't even know if Cope would be able to play till mid-December when we set the non-con schedule, we either scheduled over what we should have with the games we controlled, or they scheduled way under.

Right. And this is the potential problem. Everybody needs X number of home games for budgeting. We've usually been at 17 lately - 16 last season. Now that we add a 10th league home game and a 10th league road game, do you make up for that extra league road game by maintaining a home and home with teams like Kansas and Creighton, or do you give up the Kansas-type series to get another home game, meaning you schedule a buy game. Now the plus side to 20 league games is it takes some of the randomness out of your league strength of schedule. And I understand the idea of wanting to play your league more. But with such huge leagues now, I'm not sure you can ever find enough league games to truly take the randomness of the single-plays out of your schedule, so I think you're better off with 2 more non-con games where you can control things a bit better. Not to mention you've got the ACC & BE challenges, which may give you a home game, might not, may not even play in it - you don't really know. So basically, the B1G is going to control 21 or 22 of your 29-31 game schedule. That leaves you 8-10 games to pick up on your own. Almost certainly 5-6 of them have to be buy games. You've got Creighton. Now you're down to 3-4 more games that you can actually go out and try to strengthen your own schedule. I'd guess we're going to start asking that the CU games counts as our Gavitt Game at some point soon, just to give us a bit more flexibility. Or down the road you play another one of these 2-game neutral site tourneys in KC and see if CU would play us there for one of the games. Have to get creative. Non-con scheduling just gets really tough with 20 league games. If you're going to play 20, you better hope your league doesn't have a down year like this one ever again, or it's going to cost you spots on Selection Sunday.

Agreed - but we may be in a similar boat in 2018-19 with 20 conference games. Next year the Big Ten Tourney should be March 13-17 2019. So that gives us 10 weeks from Dec. 31 through March 10 to play 20 conference games. If they want to give teams any byes in there, they may choose to play a couple of conference games in early December again. Beyond the 2 early December games, this 2018 league schedule had 16 games in 8 weeks (Jan. 1 thru Feb. 25) and they had to condense it (like having 4 games in 8 days) to give one 7-day bye in there. So in 2019 they either have to repeat what they did this year with two games in December to spread out the last 18 games over 10 weeks to create natural byes or they have to play 20 games in 10 weeks with no byes or they'll have to condense it a bit again to get 20 games in 10 weeks with a 7-day bye. (They could start league play Dec. 23 or 24 and play the week between Christmas and New Years to get 11 weeks for 20 league games, but I can't see that happening. Maybe they start Dec. 27 or 28 with the first league game, but that's in the heart of football bowl season, so not likely.) My guess is we get early December conference games again to squeeze in 20 league games. I'd imagine the TV ratings were pretty good for those games, and you get students in the building, which is good. Since we're playing fewer non-con games it won't feel as squeezed early, but I'm not sure we want to draw 3 Top 15 teams plus a trip to Omaha again like we did this year in a 13-day span. So there's part of the challenge of scheduling, because you don't know who you're going to draw in league play in that early December slot before your non-con schedule is done. I'd guess the B1G just tells you to leave those dates open.

Sorry - when I listed the auto bids earlier, I thought all teams that tied for the regular season title received auto bids, but that wasn't the case, only the #1 seeds. Good thing, or we would not have made it at all. Unreal.

OK. Well, we were nowhere near the bubble apparently. It looks like 25 or 26 wins might not have been enough. Wow.

wow. i need to go barf now.

True - at least we weren't knocked out by that one game. Ugh. Almost enough to make me feel sorry for the Irish. Almost. I think we probably needed that KU game plus another high quality win on the road somewhere (CU, Mich St, Ohio St, Purdue). And then maybe a win in the Big Ten Tourney too. Based on the criteria the committee used, with schools like OU and Texas in comfortably & ASU & Syracuse getting to Dayton & N Dame being the 1st out, we were not close unfortunately. The Q1 wins were the key. With the regular season we had, our only shot probably was beat Michigan & MSU & reach the final in the Big Ten Tourney. That may have put us in Dayton, but I"m not 100% sure. We might have had to win the whole thing in NYC to get in as it turns out.

Potential NIT teams with RPIs Auto Bids (17 or 18 spots) Mid Tenn St – Conf USA (RPI 33) Northeastern – Colonial (RPI 55) Vermont – America East (RPI 60) Louisiana – Sun Belt (RPI 61) Rider – MAAC (RPI 69) UC Davis – Big West (RPI 102) Wagner – Northeast (RPI 110) N Kentucky – Horizon (RPI 115) Canisius – MAAC (RPI 122) Harvard – Ivy (RPI 124) UNC Asheville – Big South (RPI 129) Nicholls – Southland (RPI 145) SE Louisiana – Southland (RPI 150) Fla Gulf Coast – Atlantic Sun (RPI 172) Savannah St – MEAC (RPI 197) Hampton – MEAC (RPI 237) Bethune-Cookman – MEAC (RPI 288) ?? Arkansas-PB – SWAC (RPI 307) (May not qualify) At Large Potential Teams (14 or 15 spots) USC - RPI 34 Louisville - RPI 38 W Kentucky - RPI 39 St. Mary's - RPI 40 Boise St - RPI 50 Temple - RPI 52 Nebraska - RPI 56 Marquette - RPI 58 Utah - RPI 59 BYU - RPI 67 Baylor - RPI 68 Notre Dame - RPI 70 Washington - RPI 71 Oregon - RPI 72 Mississippi St - RPI 73 Maryland - RPI 74 Toledo - RPI 75 Penn St - RPI 77 Old Dominion - RPI 78 Georgia - RPI 79 Colorado - RPI 82 UCF - RPI 84 Oklahoma St - RPI 88 South Dakota - RPI 91 LSU - RPI 94 Boston College - RPI 95 St John's - RPI 96 I think we'll be a #2 seed, but if they stick to RPI pretty heavily, we could be a #3.

So Quadrants were huge and RPI was huge - we never had a chance as it turns out. Our resume was nowhere near good enough based on those. We could've won at Illinois & PSU and probably still have been out at 15-3 in the league. Crazy.

LOL at Rhode Island vs Oklahoma as a 7/10 game - we'd beat both of them

Goodness - Baylor was in last 4 out and no Big XII teams in Dayton. Maybe the NCAA tournament should just be a replay of the Big XII tournament.

Going to be tough to do when we go to 20 conference games next season. Another brilliant idea.

Sad part is we could've gone 14-4 (win at Illinois) and I believe we'd be in the same boat. Never thought such a thing was possible in this league.

I hate the A-10 so much.

Updated: And I have no problem with the NCAA guaranteeing these one-bid league regular season champions a spot in the NIT, but this is why it's hard to even get in the NIT anymore. Between 16 and 18 spots in the 32-team field are taken, assuming all of these teams accept their bids. I would imagine Maryland may not even get a bid now. And Penn St is probably in the NIT, but not a sure thing. I'm assuming Nevada and Rhode Island (should they not rally vs Davidson) would receive at-large NCAA bids, but they'd also be eligible here if they don't receive NCAA bids, so it's possible you could have 20 auto bids to the NIT with only 12 at large bids. NIT Automatic Qualifiers (lost in conference tournaments) Bethune-Cookman – MEAC (RPI 288) Canisius – MAAC (RPI 123) Fla Gulf Coast – Atlantic Sun (RPI 172) Hampton – MEAC (RPI 237) Harvard – Ivy (RPI 116) Louisiana – Sun Belt (RPI 61) Mid Tenn St – Conf USA (RPI 34 - on NCAA bubble) N Kentucky – Horizon (RPI 114) Nicholls – Southland (RPI 145) Northeastern – Colonial (RPI 53) Rider – MAAC (RPI 69) Savannah St – MEAC (RPI 197) SE Louisiana – Southland (RPI 150) UC Davis – Big West (RPI 102) UNC Asheville – Big South (RPI 129) Vermont – America East (RPI 60) Wagner – Northeast (RPI 109) ?? Arkansas-PB – SWAC (RPI 307) (APB finished 2nd to Grambling, but Grambling is not eligible for postseason play, so I'm not sure if APB becomes a potential NIT qualifier or if the SWAC just loses its potential slot - plus they're sub .500 so might not be eligible)