96 Madness

68 tourney projection up December 28, 2011

Seed line, In & Out list, and Conference bid breakdown available

What is 96 Madness? December 28, 2011

Short answer is that it’s my visualization of a current 96-team bracket if Selection Sunday was today.

The long answer is that I think we’re going to get to 96 teams sooner rather than later.  Rather than waiting until the NCAA brings it back up again, I want to get the discussion out in the public sphere to see what teams would or would not be included.  There’s a standard (I love that we’ve accepted this as a standard) 68 team bracket for comparison as well.  I’ve got 6 different projections for the 96 team brackets.  The first one takes our existing format and adds 28 more at-large teams.  The second projection includes all regular season conference champions.  This is based on an assumption that the current NIT will be folded into an expanded 96 team tourney and that all regular season conference champs will be guaranteed a spot.  The third starts looking at scenarios where conferences realize they could get 2 teams in the tourney by having a regular-season conference champion and a tournament champion.  Rather than having the top-seeded team throw a game in the conference tourney, what if the NCAA guaranteed 2 spots per conference.

I know the last scenario has a slim-to-none chance of happening, but if the stated objective of the selection committee is to get more mid-major teams (Cinderella stories) involved, then this would certainly accomplish it.

Off of each of these pages, there is a derivative that excludes teams without a winning record in conference inclusive of the conference tournament.  We’ll call it the “Lunardi principle” for Joe Lunardi’s stated preference that a team have a winning in-conference record to be selected by the committee.

The losing record derivatives don’t play out until mid-January when conference games start happening.  And the differences with the Conference Champion guarantee don’t appear until conference tournaments start happening.

The projections are what the bracket would look like if Selection Sunday was today.  It’s based on a team’s body of work up to this point, not what they may or may not be in the future.