My evergreen tweet that the best selection cmte in college athletics is in NCAA Hockey. There is a transparent formula to which the cmte’s selections rigidly adhere & the cmte exists merely to execute bracketing rules/geo fixes. PairWise is a shaky formula, but it’s transparent.

The amount of time spent on a problem doesn’t matter if you don’t establish specifically what you’re trying to solve for. NCAA Hockey wants to take the best PairWise teams. That’s a clear solution to the problem of selection & takes no time to ascertain.

College basketball vacillates between best team quality & best team resume. Each of those in a vacuum is objectively solvable, though by failing to define what exactly they’re solving for, they create a problem that is, by necessity, subjective and unnecessarily time consuming.

The frustrating part to fans is that the effort to add subjectivity to a process that *could* be objective if the problem were specifically defined seems to be purposeful and driven by a desire to tilt the scales against certain types of teams and for other types of teams.

Then there’s the frustrating part for those who understand what different metrics can and can’t do to solve problems objectively, when members of the various committees open their mouths & demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of what is objectively possible to determine.

Finally, to paraphrase Sheldon Cooper: It’s not that I’m saying these selection committees are not good at what they do. It’s just that what they do is not worth doing.