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This is my take as well on how the bubble was decided.They took away the last 10 games metrics at least 5 yrs ago. They wanted to emphasize the teams whole resume, full year performance, not how you did in the most recent month. Basically, a win in December is worth as much as a win in March. That is also designed to try to get teams to play better opponents early in the season.
Understand what is not on the data sheets they get on all 351 teams.
First, there are no dates on the sheets and they are not arranged by when games were played. They were arranged based on RPI breaks, they are now organized by the 4 quadrants. The only record on the sheet is the teams overall record against Div 1 opponents. It is very easy for the committee based on the sheets to see who has played alot of games against better competition and how many of those games they won and lost.
Second, there is no conference information provided - that is also something that at least officially is not part of what they look at. You aren't competing against other members of your conference for a spot, you are competing against all teams with similar profiles. On the sheets they do not say what conference the team plays in or what the record or placement is in conference.
Since only the Big 12 plays round robin using conference records is not really useful as the schedules are not the same.
It's also very clear that this committee put alot of weight on playing games against strong competition and winning at least a few of them.
USC is a good example of this. It only won 2 games against teams in the RPI Top 50 - MTSU and NM ST and the only team they beat that made the Tourney was NM ST.
They didn't have any really bad losses, but they had 0 wins to hang their hat on.
Similar situation for St. Mary's who had the win at Gonzaga, but nothing else.
L'ville was probably somewhat similar - they had sweeps of VT and FSU - 2 lower end NCAA Tourney teams and nothing else. No bad losses, but I think Committee wanted to see them beat a higher quality team at least once = that UVA game likely cost them a bid.
I suspect Syracuse got the last spot because their collection of wins is a little better than L'ville and they beat them head to head.
Clemson, Miami and likely in the committee's eyes Buffalo were stronger wins at the top.
In layman's terms, they looked for a group of schools who fit a certain profile of RPI, SOS, overall record, etc.
Then from that group, the committee selected the teams with the top wins. If you look at Oklahoma, Arizona St., and Syracuse compared to Louisville, USC, ND, MTSU, St. Mary's, etc., then it's the top wins that got the bump.
Maybe some added oomph for if the games were won on the road... even though that's supposedly factored into the quadrant system.
Still agree that ND > Cuse, and it's crazy to think that in the overall ranking Syracuse was one slot ahead of ND, which was the difference. ND beat Syracuse @ Syracuse without Colson and Farrell. They are a better team if they played today. But I think ultimately ND could only hang their hat on a win over Wichita St. from a pure resume perspective.