The NCAA Tournament and its selection committee have done a fairly decent job of picking teams to get into the tournament, but the seedings have been somewhat bizarre as of late. Some teams get high seeds just because of their name —- like Duke, Kentucky and even North Carolina at times —- and others get lower seeds because they aren't tradition blue bloods or powerhouses. Some of that is because of the emphasis on "quality wins" throughout the season and now the committee will be changing its definition of that.
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DI MBB Committee refining its definition of a quality win, placing greater emphasis on road games. https://t.co/42YgyInh8S
— David Worlock (@DavidWorlock) July 14, 2017
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Road wins will carry a lot more weight, but the plan won't take place until the 2018-19 season while this season will be used to see how different metrics perform and predict which teams get seeded where. It used to be that just the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) would rank each school a team played regardless of the venue of the game. Now, road games will be weighed in on those metrics as well so that a win against a top-50 school on their court might turn out to be more like a top-25 win.
This could help teams with a series of upsets over a season not only get into March Madness, but get a solid seed as well. It should help the "mid-majors" get some much-deserved attention and seeding too as they play tougher games than people care to believe.
