Re: Just Because I'm Annoyed.......
I can't promise to never say anything bad about the women's hockey selection committee ever again, but this debacle has at least taught me that they are far from the least competent committee.
1) The hockey committee is at least transparent. Not only does the softball committee never come out and say what the criteria are, they do their best to mislead. On May 4th, they released their second preliminary rankings of teams, which they said were based upon the criteria that they were going to use. Minnesota was at #7. Somehow, they mysteriously dropped to #17 over the next ten days, during which they went 6-0. In the statement the committee released on Monday, they said that those preliminary rankings were not a basis for the actual bracket, and that there were criteria that went into the latter that weren't used in the preliminary rankings.
2) As far as I can tell, the softball committee still hasn't realized the problem with RPI that causes a win against a bad team to lower the rating for a team. I'm pretty sure that the RPI that they use does not correct for this.
3) They still have their version of the TUC cliff, except it's even stupider. Much, much stupider. The number of wins against teams with top 25 RPIs is critically important for determining who will host a regional, though it's a lot less important for deciding who makes the tournament. In fact, it very much appears that if you don't have at least 4 wins against teams in the top 25, you will not be selected to host, no matter what the rest of your resume looks like. Minnesota fell victim to Illinois falling off the cliff and ending up at #27, where the Gophers' three wins against them did no good. Notice, though, that I said "wins," not "record" against the top 25. Losses are not deemed relevant. That's what makes it even dumber than the TUC cliff. This creates a huge bias in favor of teams that finish in the middle of the SEC, because they play so many in-conference games against top 25 teams that they'll manage to win at least four. The way that the committee looks at it, LSU's 6-16 record against teams in the top 25 is much more impressive than James Madison's 3-2, or Minnesota's 2-2, records. It's how you end up with 13 of the 16 hosts coming from two conferences.
4) When the hockey committee awards RPI bonuses for wins against top teams, it gives a bigger one for games on the road. The softball committee does no such thing, despite the fact that the (discredited) public statement about their process says that they do take it into account. This is a much bigger deal in softball than it is in hockey, because there's a huge disparity in the number of home games different teams play. Minnesota played 16 of its 57 games at home, including 0 of the 19 games they played against other teams in the tournament. Michigan and Washington played 18. Utah played 12. On the other hand, Alabama, the team that theoretically just beat out Minnesota for the last host seed (despite the fact that South Carolina and Kentucky were significantly less deserving by pretty much any measure) played 34 home games.
The whole thing was a bad joke. The coaching community did a fabulous, and needed, job of trolling the committee when they elevated Minnesota to the #1 spot in their last poll.
