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Message: [QUOTE="fieldystick, post: 3856912, member: 8152"] Thanks! I know that parts of my projections ended up being badly off of what the committee actually came up with this year, but I think ultimately all of it can be traced back to one thing: my evaluation of Syracuse being so markedly different than theirs poisoned certain things in my projection. I will try to do better next year, and I sincerely hope this eye test nonsense is not present to the degree that it was this year. And yes, I think the two close Hopkins wins are part of the the justification used to reach the ends they wanted: [B]to split the top four ACC teams into different quadrants of the bracket[/B]. After looking at and thinking about it more last night and into this morning, I think that's the most likely explanation of Maryland at #3 and [I]particularly [/I]Notre Dame at #6 behind Georgetown. The Big Ten this year was so different from how any other top-level conference has ever operated - even win-loss records had no real connection with the rest of D1 or the "realities" of past seasons - that you can pretty much argue whatever you wanted (within reason) about how they should have been evaluated/seeded, and I couldn't tell you that you were wrong... because we were all guessing. To put Rutgers in at effectively #9, though, tells me that they did evaluate the Big Ten overall positively... which begs the question of why Maryland is at #3... (and back to my predicted answer above). The only other explanation that I can see beyond the cynical one of that they were trying to split the top 4 ACC teams is this: the committee saw a massive gap in the tiers of the ACC teams that looked like this: UNC/Duke (big gap) UVA/UND (big gap) Syracuse And Maryland, despite how positively they viewed Rutgers and probably thus the Big Ten as a whole, happened to fall in the gap between UNC/Duke and Virginia. Since no team in the ACC finished better than 4-2 and none finished worse than 2-4, I'd argue that those gaps did not exist. I think the ACC actually looked more like this: UNC/Duke (small gap) UVA/UND/ ... Syracuse - with Syracuse in this tier but sort of hanging off the back of it. To me, the cynical answer is the one that makes the most sense. To have penalized Maryland for how they played against a 4-9 Hopkins team - whose 4-9 record I'd argue is nothing like a 4-9 record posted by any team in a regular season - while seemingly overall evaluating that conference as a whole positively, is asinine, in my opinion. Most of you probably know that I am a Hopkins fan, and they are the team that I know the most about. Ask any of the 8 coaches of the 8 seeded teams if they would replace their actual opponent with Hopkins if they could. I think you'd be hard pressed to get more than 1 or 2 bites on that offer. Yet Maryland probably gets penalized on the basis of close wins against this same team... please. So my ultimate answer, boiled down to one sentence: I think their play versus Hopkins would be a reason they cited for putting Maryland third, but I think the actual answer for why Maryland is #3 is something else. (A note about above: Do not think I am in any way saying Hopkins deserves a tournament berth. Hopkins does not even remotely deserve to be in that discussion; we had our chance and lost. I think justifying the penalizing of Maryland for "only just" barely beating what - in my opinion - was clearly the second best team in the Big Ten at the end of the season is nonsense.) [/QUOTE]

Verification: What is a Syracuse fan's favorite color?