They may be doing the same at a few schools that got shafted -- Mississippi State, Virginia Tech, Illinois, some others. There were also some very strange seedings, such as Duke #3 overall, Michigan State getting a 5 seed despite being #11 in the country (while Wisconsin, a much inferior team from their own conference, gets a 4 seed), on and on. Temple probably should have been higher than a 5 seed.
The one that really reeks is Florida making it in ahead of Miss. State. I have no idea what the committee was thinking. Or maybe smoking ;-) That's because, as Bobby Knight has often said, the tournament committee is not very strong when it comes to judging basketball talent. :)
Actually, for once, I don't disagree with the selection. I was emotionally pulling for Miss State to get in, but they just seem to falter late in games.
On Florida versus Miss State, it likely came down to one thing - Miss State had more "bad losses' (i.e. losses to teams outside the RPI 100) then Florida did. The selection committee pays zero attention to head-head competition during the tourney - and Florida beat Miss State in the regular season. Also, Florida had a much better strength of schedule than Miss State did. Jay Bilas put it best - sure, Miss State played extremely well against Kentucky and almost beat them twice....and maybe if they had exerted similar energy during their bad losses, they'd be in the tourney.
As for Illinois, simple - too many losses and an RPI of 74. They had that nice 5 game winning streak in January, but went 19-14 overall. Too many loses.
The V-Tech one is a big tougher - they talked tonight about the Hokies' non-conference RPI (over 200). I just looked at their non-conference schedule and it was silly. (By contrast, Wake had some good non-conference wins against ranked teams). Bilas also mentioned tonight the bad record against top RPI teams (3-4), vs Wake Forest's record against top RPI teams (6-3). And while I have no way to prove this, had V-Tech not lost by 20 to Boston College late in the season, the Hokies "might" have slipped past Wake. So while it may initially seem that V-Tech got jobbed, a closer look shows that Wake has a better overall resume.
The things that actually surprise me are some of the rankings in each of the regions. Villanova as a 2 seed is a joke - they are seriously leaking oil. Sure, they could go on a run, but they lost 5 of 7. And I still don't buy Syracuse as a #1 seed, not after the 2 losses. But whatever....
Amazingly, Duke has the "least toughest" road to the final four. Their region is nothing like the other 3 regions.
