Big Dance selection keeps getting better
Bart Torvik chats about his metrics — the latest positive addition to the NCAA Tournament selection committee's team sheets
The email from the NCAA was innocuous enough. “MBB Committee Summer Meeting Recap,” went the header, and with all due respect to the fine folks at HQ in Indianapolis, this is usually not the sort of stuff that gets folks’ (OK, my) juices flowing. The committee met, as committees do. Good to know.
The lead of the NCAA’s press release was also pretty toned down, focusing as it did on the news that the Division II and III championships, and the semifinals and finals of the NIT, will all happen alongside the Final Four in Indianapolis in 2026. Look: That’s a really nice little change. It’s adorable and fun. More meaningful basketball at Final Four weekend, and more exposure for kids at lower levels, is something we can all get behind. It is not, however, Earth shattering.
And then came best bit, practically buried down in paragraph five:
The committee also spent considerable time discussing principles and procedures for selecting, seeding and bracketing teams, and affirmed that the 2025 championship will feature an automatic qualifier from each of the 31 conferences to go along with the best 37 at-large teams as determined by the committee. The evaluation of teams will be enhanced by the addition of two metrics as the committee voted to include the Torvik and Wins Against Bubble (WAB) rankings on the team sheets.
Now we’re talking! Real summer college basketball news! OK, sure, fine, maybe it’s “news” to a relatively small number of sickos, those of us who spend too much time thinking about how a room full of people decide which college basketball teams they think are the 36 37 best every March, but still: For us, this is real, actual, meaningful news.
It was two other things:
Another point toward this publication’s hobbyhorse that while people complain about NCAA Tournament selection and seeding way more and for much longer durations in the season than they used to, in fact the process is vastly better now than ever before, and also
A triumph for Bart, an unassuming Chicagoland lawyer and Wisconsin die-hard who started his own rankings site as a fun little side hobby, and who used to blog about stuff like why something like WAB should be a committee metric as far back as 2017.
I reached out to Bart to ask him quickly about the news, have him explain his rankings and the concept of WAB, and see whether he agrees with me about my grand theory that the selection process is actually kind of good these days.
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