Comparing Team Selection and Seeding for the 2011 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament

The men’s NCAA basketball tournament is a popular sporting event often referred to as “March Madness.” Each year the NCAA committee not only selects but also seeds the tournament teams. Invariably there is much discussion about which teams were included and excluded as well as discussion about the seeding of the teams. In this paper, we propose an innovative heuristic measure of team success, and we investigate how well the NCAA committee seeding compares to the computer-based placements by Sagarin and the rating percentage index (RPI). For the 2011 tournament, the NCAA committee selection process performed better than those based solely on the computer methods in determining tournament success.