I have great news! We are going to take a look back at the 2022 MLAX selection process. But it's not what you think. The thing that always irked me about last year's at-large choices was not which teams got in and which were left out. It was that it felt like there wasn't a consistent internal logic to it. ND didn't beat any tournament teams...unless they had given Duke an at-large.
But I have finally found it. A not-too-complex system using SOR as the basis which produces the same at-large choices that the committee made. This is not to say that they deliberately picked this system and then the choices followed. But they might as well have. And it's not like they had any crazy rules. It's an RPI-based Strength-of-Record system along the same lines as the one I laid out
here
Before I get into the rules that produced their choices, here's the important thing. If you didn't like the choices that they made last year, they you have to say which part of their "system" you disagree with. And there are 3 components to it.
First, change the RPI weights from 25% win pct / 50% opp win pct / 25% opp opp win pct to 25% / 60% / 15%.
Next, strongly de-emphasize a team's lesser wins. In effect, focus on a team's 4 or 5 best wins and ignore the rest.
Last, include a head-to-head rule where if the first-team-out has a win against the last-team-in, then flip them so that the first-team-out gets the bid.
You can see the results
here (I've pre-loaded the settings), but such a system leaves you with Harvard/OSU in and Duke/ND out.
Basically Harvard is in because their wins were as good as anyone's. Duke is out because their volume of decent wins is ignored. ND would get the bid because their SOR was higher than OSU, but the Buckeyes get the nod because of the H2H victory over the Irish.
Again, you may not like the outcome, but your argument is with the settings used, not the results. If you don't like their results, which part of the system would you change. Share your preferred rules and we can figure out which makes the most sense. If you did think the choices were justified, is this a system you feel comfortable with? If not, how would you tweak it?
Until now, it was a valid argument to say, "well there is something about all this that numbers can't capture." If that was your argument, I wouldn't have had an answer. But now I do. There is a system that captures the decision-process the committee used. And that means that when the selections come out this year, we can see if they used the same logic or not. When you use wins vs the various RPI tiers, you are using an SOR-based system. Now I've got the rules to prove it.
