NCAA Weekly, 15.1: One final pre-Selection Sunday update shows a historically tight field

The Talladega Tournament

This is the fourth and final installment (1, 2, 3) in a series about the strength, or lack thereof, of the 2022-23 men’s college basketball field. I would like to get this out on Selection Sunday itself, but given that this blog also covers Tennessee men’s basketball and I expect at minimum to be devoting a lot of coverage their way through Friday, this is the best possible date for this to come out. It’s like a pre-conference tournament snapshot of the field, if you like.

Anyway, as a reminder, Ken Pomeroy’s site has ratings on February 1 of a given year for every year dating back to 1998. I’m using the top 50 because that’s the same amount of teams that generally constitute the top 12 seed lines. This is obviously far from perfect because they don’t seed the bracket by KenPom rating, but considering the average 11 seed ranks around 46th or so with the average 12 seed about 57th, it’s fairly functional. The real drop-off is in the 13-16 seeds, as the average 13 seed ranks 81st.

This time, I’m putting the final update behind a paywall. The first three were meant to generate page views and draw as many people in as possible. Given that access to the site is now just $12 for a full year through March 31, I think it’s fair to lock this one down. If you sign up, I can promise it will be worth your $12. The quality of work here is at least 17% as satisfying as a $12 meal at Wendy’s, which in my experience is unfortunately several of the meals at my local Wendy’s now.

So: come on through.

On with the show.