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NCAA Tournament Selection and Seeding, but actually though

Did you put it here because the other thread looks destined for deletion?
 
70% Heartening
30% Frustrating imo

Obviously they've taken significant steps to reduce the impact committee members can have on their teams. Is it zero? Probably not. Is it negligible? I'm inclined to believe it might be and therefore not worth worrying about.

Nice that they don't care about the number of teams from a conference. I'm a big fan of call what you see. If team A commits 80 penalties in a row, call em. If you think a conference deserves 4 teams, vote for em.

Some of her thoughts suggested that small sample sizes (i.e. single games) get weighed too heavily. Beating Wisconsin for UMD for example. This also relies on Wisconsin achieving a certain level of dominance which I think they were further from this season.

It would be nice in this case to have shared every ballot without a name attached. I guess if people aren't allowed to vote on their own teams you could figure some of them out though.
 
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Still doesn’t remove the possible “smokey room” scenario where Crowley and Barlo agree to vote for each other’s teams... (winking emoji)
 
Really appreciate the article. great media coverage by many of this tourney. In the end UMD showed why they were in the tourney, the Providence spot still looks like a miss to me, but it is what it is. It was nice of Brenner to put out various details and how she saw certain things.

Just looking at ways women’s sports have been harmed by non transparent processes in the past (think USA Hockey and their food per diems for the men vs the women for example) I would hope those making decisions always call for transparency. Another thing is just that the NCAA really is the gold standard for women’s hockey leagues, it’s the developmental league for the National teams, we frankly rely on them to be the leader in bring women’s hockey into the mainstream.

I noticed that Hilary Knight called out the NCAA for not having a power play clock on the game. Good for her. Hopefully someone can push whatever buttons necessary to make that happen for the next 4 games!
 
Though, like Providence, I probably don’t belong in this conversation, before this thread disappears along with the season I want to highlight something that I found striking in the Q&A and that hasn’t received much play: “Consensus was never a part of the process.” In any normal year, when the committee relies on the math and adjudicates the bubble and rejiggers the bracket, this remains a thankless task that routinely frustrates partisans, and I imagine consensus, whenever it does occur, is hard-won. It’s an imperfect system. This pretty abnormal year certainly seemed to call for a process that at least encouraged a meeting of the minds. But while S.O.S. input from RACs and league commissioners, “extensive notes” (combined with five individual “understandings of the criteria”!) might point to extraordinary effort, they can only go so far if your mandate is, in effect: Make of it what you will and then cast secret ballots! So from the get-go this group seemed destined to deliver “huge surprises.” This was not a smoke-filled zoom. One possible resulting scenario: a recusenik, or any committee member for that matter, casts what he/she perceives to be a strategic, non-conspiratorial throw-away vote for a true outlier (PC, for example), only to be confounded by the fact that PC receives a real vote or two (Brenner, for one?). Of course I have no idea about the actual mechanics of the voting, including the number of ballots needed, so this could well be an impossible, wacky scenario. But it was a wacky scenario that took consensus off the table in the first place and led to decisions that seemed to please no one. So either have transparent procedures, open votes in committee (that don’t have to be made public), and fairly frank disclosure of the inevitable compromises needed to get home, or get creative and go with an ad hoc expanded committee that mitigates recusals, fosters conversation and generally lightens the load. Prepare for the next pandemic.

Admittedly this comes from the peanut gallery, where the view isn’t always the clearest. Hats off to all those involved, including the committee, who somehow managed to bring us this improbable season!
 
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