A salute to the WAC Resume Seeding System
Non-conference games were meaningless in 31 conferences
For most leagues, conference play begins in earnest this week. And for most leagues, the schedule up to this point has been meaningless.
Of course, the players and coaches obviously care about them. And competition is meaningful even if there’s no actual reward for winning. You do get some idea how good a team will be in conference play based on the performance in non-conference games. But unless a team is positioning itself for an at-large bid, there’s no reward for winning most of these games other than good vibes.
There’s a line of thinking that increased attention on the NCAA tournament has made the regular season meaningless. But in reality, the existence of the tournament is the only thing that makes non-conference games meaningful. Even then, the games only have meaning for those few teams with a realistic shot of an at-large bid.
Games aren’t meaningless because a large (though increasingly exclusive) postseason tournament exists. They’re meaningless because there’s no tangible reward for winning. And in 31 leagues, there’s no reward for winning non-conference games.
If you are reading this, you are probably aware that there is one conference where every game has something on the line. For the second consecutive season, the WAC is using a system to reward its men’s and women’s basketball teams for non-conference wins.1 And without using margin of victory. It simply provides a reward in proportion to the strength of the opponent and the location of the game.
Last season, the news of this approach was not well-received by hall of fame journalists:
First of all, at what point in Mr. DeCourcy’s career did the WAC hurt him? Did Rick Majerus mock him at a press conference or something? I’m not sure why we need to single out the league as “small-time.”
Second, the pejorative isn’t even true. You’ll hardly find a better success story than the modern WAC in the history of college basketball. In 2015, they lost the last of their major football playing programs. Two years later, the reinvented league ranked 31st in men’s basketball. Eight seasons after that, the league ranked 11th. The MEAC is the 31st-ranked conference this year. Any chance they’re close to 11th in any of the next 10 seasons?2
Third, and most relevant to this piece, why are we criticizing a league merely making an effort to make its non-conference games meaningful, something that most of our sport routinely struggles with?
In the SEC, they say “it just means more”. Which is neat, but if they were accurate, they would say “it just means more except for non-conference games which actually mean nothing.” In the WAC, non-conference games literally do mean more than anywhere else.3
And the rewards for each game are known and published for all to see. There’s total transparency! As shown here for Seattle, one can see exactly how they got to their current total of 0.19 WAC points, and also the expected reward for winning any future games.4
Rewarding non-conference wins can, of course, lead to things like the team with best conference record not earning a one-seed. This could happen this year on the men’s side as these are the current standings:
Thanks to a 12-1 non-conference mark that included 4 wins over top 100 teams, Grand Canyon has lapped the field so far. And given that the swing in a game between a loss and a win is one point, they could cough up a few conference games and still get the top seed.
This scenario actually happened last season when Sam Houston beat out Utah Valley for the top seed in the league, even though the Wolverines’ record against conference opponents was one game better than the Bearkats.
That might seem strange at first, but the college tradition of ignoring non-conference games is actually what’s strange. Imagine the NFL ignoring games between the AFC and NFC when determining playoff seeding, or MLB ignoring interleague play in the standings. That would be silly because every game should have a reward attached to it. Otherwise, there’s not much point in playing it.
You might say: College is different. There’s such a big difference in ability from the best team to the worst teams that you can’t include non-conference games for purposes of conference standings. However, this isn’t 1977. We know how tough it is to beat teams of various strengths. Or at least we know well enough.
To some this was controversial.
Well, it is a very cool and good system. Sam Houston earned that top seed with both a great conference performance and non-conference wins at Oklahoma and Utah. The Oklahoma game was the very first game of the season. Every game matters! (Utah Valley hurt itself with a non-conference to NET #292 Morgan State.) The strangest reaction from a conference would be to say “thanks for all of your success in non-conference, but it’s actually worth nothing to us.”
The not-cool and bad systems are employed by the other 31 conferences where only a subset of games are considered for conference seeding. This season, teams like Princeton and McNeese State have had amazing non-conference runs, but those get completely forgotten once conference play starts. Both teams have brought glory (and power-ranking equity) to their league and earned nothing from it.
The WAC system is better than the system used by any other league, and it’s also better system than the NCAA uses for its tournament, since the selection committee’s rewards for wins are unknown. You know that Gonzaga’s win over USC helped them, but you don’t know how much. On Selection Sunday, even committee members won’t be able to say, because it’s all subjective and impossibly complicated for humans to analyze.
Hope springs eternal that the NCAA will someday use a system like this. So far, they’ve shown no willingness to do so. Even where they had the opportunity to test something innovative in the NIT, they chose to not even try, and will simply reward teams based on NET ranking. The NET, previously described a sorting tool, now is the de-facto ranking method for the top-six leagues to earn a bid to the NIT. (It’s very bad to have a ranking so heavily dependent on scoring margin be used in this way.)
By contrast, the WAC Resume Seeding System gives the same reward to a team regardless of margin of victory. It’s relatively simple, elegant, and transparent. And I hope it’s eventually used throughout college basketball.
The Jim Boeheims and Roy Williams of the world who were unwilling to use better statistical measures in this sport are gradually being replaced by coaches who grew up with that stuff and understand its value. The same will be true for administrators as well.
Eventually, the sport will be run by people who are comfortable with objective measures to determine seeding and selection for postseason tournaments. You’ll be able to trace that evolution directly back to what the WAC is doing now. Whether it takes five years or 50 is the only question.
Full disclosure, I worked on this system under the leadership of WAC Commissioner Brian Thornton and Associate Commissioner for Basketball Drew Speraw. I mean, why else would I be writing about it?
It’s true that the WAC membership has changed over this time period, but that’s included adding four teams that were making their debut in Division-I plus a fifth team, Seattle, that didn’t make its D-I debut until the 2010 season. It’s not like they plucked established programs with great tradition for this rebuild.
As far as I know, there has been only one other case of non-conference standings in the history of men’s college hoops. There was a bizarre experiment in the Metro Conference in 1984, where Louisville was allowed to swap out two games against weaker conference teams for nationally-televised games against DePaul and Marquette. Those contests were counted as conference games for Louisville.
All of these values are tied to an opponent’s NET ranking, which obviously can change over the course of the season. But in most cases the reward for a specific game don’t change a whole lot during the season.