NCAA Men's Basketball and the Legislative Process.

NCAA Men’s Basketball and the Legislative Process.  If the Christmas Season is the Time to be Jolly, NCAA March Madness is the Time to be Crazy!  The NCAA’s men’s basketball championship tournament somehow brings out the best and the worst of America’s rabid basketball fan base.  Now I am a simple man; stoic to a fault.  But believe it or not, I can see a similarity to the evolution of the NCAA Tournament administration and the current state of Congress.  Bear with me and try to follow this disjointed, meandering post about that analogy.

Basketball first.  As a proper disclaimer, I will admit to being a large University of Kentucky basketball fan; loyal and excitable, but not rabid to the point of bleeding blue.  That being said…One of the most fascinating and popular topics for argument and debate during this time of year is the selection and seeding of the NCAA Tournament teams by the NCAA Selection Committee.  This Committee, composed of ten college Athletic Directors from across the nation, determines exactly which teams will participate in the annual NCAA Tournament, who they will play, and where they will play.  Now this group of AD’s is an esteemed bunch; well respected and well-meaning in their attempt to structure a fair and balanced basketball championship contest.  My problem is not so much with the people, but with the process.  Let’s be honest; they could put 68 teams in hat, pull out the teams and fill out the brackets at random, and still have a tremendous tournament and show.  College basketball is exciting and there will always be the Cinderella stories and the Davey vs. Goliath match-ups.  It is equally inevitable that there will be some teams who do not get in the tournament that should be in, and some will be in that should be left out.  There will also be certain inequities that occur due to seeding and bracket construction.  Despite the Committee’s best efforts, this will happen.  Therefore the goal is not to eliminate any trace of unfairness from the process, but rather to limit that unfairness to the smallest degree possible.

Now here comes the analogy.  Any legislative product that flows from our government will be not be perfect; there will always be winners and there will always be losers with any particular piece of legislation.  The goal is to limit that balance so that the prevailing effect is clearly in the people’s best interest.  Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that in the last couple of decades, the legislative winners just keep on winning and the legislative losers just keep on losing.  The rich get richer; the poor get poorer.  The wealthy are a more effective lobby for their cause because they have so many assets to influence the process.  It is a vicious cycle where the powerful control the process and thus perpetuate their preferred status.

A similar situation exists in college basketball.  The Power Five conferences have an inordinate amount of influence on the NCAA and how it conducts business.  Mind-boggling media contracts have further cemented the Power Five group’s strangle hold on college athletics.  The two best examples of this paradigm shift are the SEC in football and the ACC in basketball.   If the bulk of a conference’s teams are pre-season ranked in the top 25, the season becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of that particular conference’s advantage over others.  Based on these early polls, any loss to a conference opponent becomes a good loss and any win becomes a signature win.  Have a good season in your conference, play .500 ball outside of the conference, and you’ll be taken care of in the post season.  It really makes it rough if are not a member of the Power Five club, but it is the way it is.  I’ll give this to the basketball boys:  At least they decide it on the field of play (court).  The football folks still maintain their championship as largely a product of polls and opinions; but that was the topic of a prior post.  The preseason polls…well that can be fixed.  Just eliminate preseason and early season polls.  Let the first polls come out a few weeks into the season so that the initial rankings are based on performance and not on expectations.  This would go a long ways towards helping to eliminate that built-in scheduling advantage of the Power Five conferences and help to ease their strangle hold on those precious NCAA Tournament seeds.  It would also lend more credibility to poll-driven metrics such as SOS and RPI.

Now you’re wondering…What does the NCAA Tournament have to do with Legislation.  Just this: Any decision that is made, be it Congressional or by the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee, is made up of two components.  One component is the judgment of the entity members and the other is some form of metric; a clearly definable fact(s) or measure(s).  In both cases, Congress and NCAA, I submit that the judgment component has become far too large in proportion to the metric component.  And any time we begin to rely on judgment over reality, we increase the risk of bias and poor decisions.  Now any process must have a human factor because all things are not binary; but that human component should be limited.  Defending one’s opinion is far more difficult than reviewing a won/lost record, or a SOS rating, or rich/poor statistics, or the simple process of budgetary constraint, or cost/benefit analysis.  For instance, if the NCAA’s goal is 75 percent metric and 25 percent judgment, we are currently way out of joint.  The same can be said for the legislative process; too much opinion and political agenda goes into the lawmaking system.  Our Senators and Representatives are no more genius than are the NCAA Selection Committee members.  In both cases, we need good people of high integrity and good judgment; but their roles need to be limited by the process.  Humans are fallible and the first step towards a good system is a frank acknowledgment of that fallibility.  I fear that Congress and the NCAA Tournament Committees have lost their grip on their own fallibilities.  They both need to revise their processes down to a proper balance between metrics and opinions.  Oh, and by the way…Go Cats!!!