Don't Fear De Remer: Sorry Brown, You Should've Seen it Coming

While the Harvard women's soccer team rejoiced at the Grille Sunday upon discovering its selection into the NCAA Tournament, the Brown women's soccer team tried to cope with its exclusion, miles away in Providence.

I don't know exactly what was going through the heads of the Brown players at the time, but based on my experience interviewing disappointed athletes, here is my best guess:

"We've been blatantly overlooked! Didn't we soundly thrash Harvard, 2-0, back in September?

"Did the league offices forget to fax the Ivy standings to the NCAA? Didn't they see third-place Brown (13-4, 5-2 Ivy), fourth-place Harvard (10-7, 4-3)?

"Harvard has brought new meaning to the phrase, 'backing into the tournament.' How often does a team qualify for NCAAs following five straight losses? Is this a first?

"Was the NCAA watching on Saturday? Didn't they see Harvard choke against Columbia, while we came back from a 2-0 deficit against Yale and won 3-2 in overtime? Which team has more heart?"

Sorry Brown, but the NCAA doesn't care one bit that you won more of your games down the stretch and that you beat Harvard head-to-head and in the Ivy standings. The NCAA has to be objective, cold, and insensitive--it can't take any dramatics into account.

Brown, you should have known. Your coach, after all, used to be head of the selection committee. Do you remember last year's Dartmouth team? Like the 2000 Harvard squad, that fifth-place Dartmouth (10-8-1, 3-3-1) team played an ambitious schedule following an Ivy championship season and paid the price in terms of wins and losses, yet still made the tourney.

Had you been paying attention to NCAA selection procedures in recent years, you would have seen this coming.

Selection Misperceptions

There are a number of misperceptions about the way the NCAA ranks and selects its teams that made Harvard's selection chances look worse than they actually were.

First off, notice that the NCAA does not rank teams like the NFL tie-breaking system. The NFL teaches us that team rankings should be determined by record, then head-to-head contests, then league records, records vs. common opponents, and then strength of the schedule. The NCAA approaches a similar list of criteria in a wholly different manner.

Another common misperception is that the NCAA actually takes the time to do a pair-wise comparison of every team using human observation, matching their relative performances head-to-head, and arranging the teams in such a way as to reduce the number of contradictions between the rankings and the head-to-head results.

To see why this does not happen, I'll leave an exercise to the reader. Find the online schedules of Hartford, Connecticut, Dartmouth, Boston College, Boston University, Brown, Princeton and Harvard. Now try to rank these teams fairly based solely on head-to-head results. Are you confused yet? Mission accomplished.

A more prominent cause for confusion--one that afflicts just about everyone--is the difference between the way that polls react to losses and the way the NCAA reacts to losses.

The way polls generally work is that they change based on marginal results. In other words, your ranking only rises significantly if you beat a good team, and it only falls significantly if you lose to a bad team.

Harvard's first-ever loss to Columbia on Saturday brought about the same, immediate knee-jerk reaction from many parties: Harvard should plummet in the rankings and miss the tournament.

That reflex is completely right in the former assumption, completely wrong in the latter.

Harvard did plummet in the latest National Soccer Coaches Association of America poll, right behind--you guessed it--Brown and Boston College, two teams that did not make the tournament. Luckily for Harvard, a poll did not determine its NCAA fate.

So What Happened?

Harvard lost to Columbia and still made the tournament with plenty of room to spare.

While most so-called bubble teams are forced to play all their tourney games on the road, Harvard's tournament will begin with a home game against the mighty Braves of Quinnipiac tomorrow, a team that had to win a play-in game just to make the tourney.

Not only that, the Crimson's potential second-round opponent is Hartford, the lowest-ranked team to receive a bye into the second round.

The placement suggests that Harvard was much more than a bubble team.

Part of the reason for Harvard's good fortune is the relative weakness of the Northeast Region. [NCAA women's soccer does not have the budget of NCAA men's basketball, which can fly teams across country to neutral sites.] But Harvard received favoritism within its own region, which can be seen by comparing the Crimson's situation with Princeton's.

The Tigers have to travel all the way to Wisconsin, and then play Connecticut, the Northeast's top-ranked team, a path much more difficult than the Crimson's.

Clearly, the NCAA smiled upon Harvard. The Crimson wasn't even close to being left out of this tournament. Why?

Three words: ratings-percentage index (RPI). The RPI is calculated based on a weighted average of a team's record, the records of a team's opponents, and the records of a team's opponents' opponents.

The recent trend in NCAA selections is that the RPI is everything.

All other comparisons--record against common opponents and head-to-head results--only matter when distinguishing between teams with relatively close results on the index.

You can't blame them for using such a simplistic method of comparison. It's not easy to accurately select and rank 48 teams.

To do well in the RPI, you have to play a lot of good teams, and beat just enough of them. That's exactly what Harvard did this season. Teams like Davidson (14-8) and Loyola Marymount (12-6-1) were a couple of the "easy" opponents on the Crimson's non-conference schedule.

The NCAA does not blindly accept the RPI. It will disregard teams that earned high rankings without getting a quality win all season, but Harvard was not in this category. The Crimson beat two conference champions, Princeton and Boston University, and Boston College while it was nationally ranked.

So how did the selection committee react to Harvard's loss to Columbia? It only hurt Harvard as much as it hurt its RPI ranking, i.e. not much at all. The RPI treats a win over Princeton paired with a loss to Columbia the same as it would treat a win over Columbia paired with a loss to Princeton.

Still not convinced? Let's go to the ultimate source, Debbie Warren, Selection Committee Chair, who appeared on an online chat session last night. A likely heartbroken relation of Brown freshman forward Molly Cahan asked Warren, "Why was Harvard selected over Brown?"

Warren's reply: "Harvard had more significant results and their schedule was tougher. The regional committee in the Northeast felt Harvard was a stronger team even with the head-to-heads."

Based on that quote, this is my impression of what actually happened:

The selection committee needed another at-large team from the Northeast. Harvard's high RPI and high-quality wins made it the best candidate. The chair then turned to the Northeast committee and asked, "Is Harvard really that good?" The Northeast committee smiled and nodded.

Harvard was written into the brackets.

So that is why Harvard is playing at 1 p.m. tomorrow, while Brown is finished.

Is the NCAA methodology fair or accurate? Well, just look at how some of the NCAA's at-large selections have performed in recent years, across all sports.

The 1999 Dartmouth women's soccer team may have only finished fifth-place in the league, but it was the only Ivy team to win a NCAA game.

In men's basketball last year, everyone cried foul when Virginia, with its 70th-ranked RPI, got rejected in lieu of North Carolina, with the 30th-ranked RPI and two head-to-head losses to Virginia. North Carolina made it to Final Four.

Further questions as to whether this methodology is fair can be left to the philosophy concentrators. In the meantime, we'll see how deep this Harvard women's soccer team can go.