In Reply to: West Virginia strikes back at the NCAA posted by mh on March 17, 2025 at 16:04:54
I will never defend the selection of the teams, only their seeding and placement at sites. But the typical politician's claim that "Nearly every single sports fan, pundit and Bracketologist had WVU as a shoo-in for the tournament," is irrelevant since the bracketologists don't use the same criteria as the committee, just probably a better one since they mostly didn't pick UNC. So what is the committee's criteria for selection? It isn't very transparent.
So this is an attempt to figure out how they left out WVU and included UNC, assuming no "backroom deals, corruption, bribes or any nefarious activity" took place, not defend it.
WVU was lower in the NET rankings than UNC by a good margin (#36 to #51). How is that possible with the 1-12 Quad 1 record? The NET is not just based on Quad wins and losses. There are two components: Team Value Index and Adjusted Net Efficiency. TVI includes Quad wins, but also puts extra weight on road and neutral-site wins. UNC's record in those games was 10-10, WVU's 6-9. Efficiency as in Kenpom was also much higher for UNC, #33 to #53. WVU's offensive efficiency wasn't very good (#133). Torvick's t-rank and WAB was also mentioned in the article, but it was about even for both teams. UNC's Strength of Schedule was also higher than WVU's by most measures.
So if you only look at the 1-12, of course UNC shouldn't be in, but based on all of the the committee's criteria, one can understand the committee's decision to take them over WVU although not agree with it.