![]() ![]() But would anyone rank Baylor ahead of Gonzaga on their top 25 ballot right now? I doubt it.Īs the old saying goes, “If you torture the numbers long enough, they’ll confess to anything.” My ballot is my ballot. 3 on the overall seed chart behind Baylor, which has seven Quad 1 wins. For those purposes, it’s not really a close call between those two. Why? Because the Tigers have six Quad 1 wins compared to Gonzaga’s three, and Auburn beat their common opponent ( Alabama) on the road while Gonzaga lost to the Tide in a home-neutral setting. I’ll get into my reasoning below, but if I were doing a tourney bracket, there is no question that I would put Auburn as the No. Take, for example, my decision to keep ranking Gonzaga No. (Or as I like to call it, the “kindness section.”) With so many data points and opposing forces at my disposal, this inevitably lends to all kinds of contradictions and inconsistency in my reasoning, which you all so eagerly point out each week in the comments section. That includes my use of the “eye test,” which I am vehemently against using when it comes to doing a bracket. I consider the metrics and how teams have done in all the NET quadrants, but in the end I want my ballot to reflect where the teams stand today - e.g., somewhere between a power ranking and a tournament bracket. On the other hand, when I’m doing a top 25 ballot, I allow myself the luxury of being subjective, picky, and more reliant on recent results. The committee members (and the bracketologists who play them on TV) can lean on the predictive metrics (especially when it comes to seeding), but for the most part, their mission is to assess a team’s overall resume, and specifically its performance in the four quadrants as determined by the NET ranking. For starters, every game must count the same in the eyes of the selection committee, no matter when it was played. I firmly believe there should be very little subjectivity or recency bias when it comes to assembling a bracket. So it behooves me to point out that I do not view a top 25 ballot the same as a projected bracket. ![]()
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