NCAA Eliminates Useless Component From Tournament Selection

Ford Field, 2009 NCAA Tournament Championship

Among the many criteria the NCAA tournament selection committee uses to select and seed the 65 teams for the NCAA tournament, the most statistically irrelevant is the "last 12 games" criteria. The NCAA has finally seen the light and eliminated the last 12 games from the toolbox.

There are many reasons for the stat's uselessness. There is little statistical correlation to how a team finished their season, and that team's performance in the NCAA tournament. It is generally misleading, especially in the power conferences where TV scheduling emphasizes that the projected top teams play each other later in the season while the teams expected in the lower half face each other.

It unfairly discounts what happened in the early part of the schedule. Something that can be very unfair to the mid-major teams that play and win games against good teams. It also sends a mixed message on the importance of the non-conference schedule when the final twelve games emphasized are almost always conference games. Something the Committee seemed to recognize when it decided to eliminate it.

"As the committee continues to hone its message regarding how it views the season, parsing a particular segment of games and implying it had greater weight than others seemed misleading and inconsistent," said committee chair and Southeastern Conference Commissioner Mike Slive. "The removal of this reference avoids confusion in the room and brings our reporting in line with our process."

Examining a team's last 12 games was a resource put in place for committee members to gauge how strongly a team finished its season. It was never intended that the last portion of a team's season should carry more weight than other portions of the schedule.

Now if they would only do something about that play-in game ...