The Pac-10 conference should ask for an investigation into the 2008 NCAA basketball selection process. Why? Because the selection of the University of Arizona over Arizona State made this year's conference schedule almost meaningless. Consider that Arizona State finished the regular conference schedule with a 9-9 record and was seeded fifth in the conference tournament. The University of Arizona finished at 8-10 and was seeded seventh. ASU defeated Arizona twice this year. As things played out, ASU also defeated two sweet-sixteen teams, Stanford and Xavier, this year. Yet the selection committee chose Arizona as the sixth of six teams from the Pac-10 and bypassed ASU, claiming that Arizona had a much higher RPI rating. The Pac-10 should question the applicability of the RPI measurement in the selection of a team that cannot produce a winning record in its conference. This reflects negatively on the strength of the conference as a whole.

Commentators Dick Vitale and Jay Bilas seriously questioned the omission of ASU during ESPN's selection telecast. Bilas went so far as to say that the RPI benchmark should be eliminated as a selection tool and be replaced by the Sagarin Ratings measurement. This change would not fix the system, only exchange one index for another, probably with the same result sometime down the road.

There is a better way, which would remove the subjectivity and, yes, political maneuvering that obviously goes on during the selection process. In a nutshell, this is it: the selection committee should rate and rank total conferences, not individual teams, and should assign the number of teams to be selected from each conference based on these ratings. The committee should be free to choose whatever indicators it wishes to determine conference ratings, including indicators that would give the so-called mid-majors reasonable participation levels. The NCAA should encourage, or even mandate, inter-conference preseason play among the major conferences to assist in determining a "Strength of Conference" (SOC) indicator and rating. With this method some conferences would be assigned only one team, its conference champion, as occurs now. Conferences with multiple teams assigned would themselves determine which teams are selected based on their conference seedings.

The second responsibility of the selection committee should be the seeding of the selected teams within the regional tournaments, much as it does currently. Under the proposed system this seeding process would be simplified by using the SOC rating coupled with team performance within and outside its conference.

The Pac-10 was considered one of the top conferences in the country this year. If we were to apply the suggested selection process and assign six teams to the tournament, those six teams would include ASU and not Arizona. If the committee was convinced that Arizona deserved to be selected, it would have to assign seven teams to the Pac-10. Given the strength of the conference this year, this would not be considered unreasonable. If the committee included Arizona State in this manner, it could use Arizona's perceived higher overall performance to award it a higher seed than ASU. There is some logic to this, as opposed to the complete lack of logic in excluding ASU.

Several teams other than ASU felt short-changed in this year's selection competition. The advantage of this new selection process is that their arguments for selection would be made by the conferences, not by individual schools, coaches or administrations.

Learn more about this author, Emee Benwell.
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