WAC takes creative step toward seeding postseason hoops tournaments; will other conferences soon follow suit?

By Matt Tait     Jul 15, 2022

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Kansas guard Dajuan Harris Jr. (3) slings a pass around Stephen F. Austin forward Calvin Solomon (13) during the second half on Saturday, Dec. 18, 2021 at Allen Fieldhouse.

As the power conferences in college athletics compete for dominance and survival simultaneously, at least one lower-tier conferences has turned creative in changing its future.

Earlier this week, [CBS Sports’ Matt Norlander reported that the Western Athletic Conference had come up with an entirely new way to seed its postseason][1] men’s and women’s conference basketball tournaments.

In short, the seeds will be assigned based on analytics, and I’d be willing to bet that in the next 5-10 years just about every conference in college basketball will be doing it the same way.

According to Norlander, WAC commissioner Brian Thornton and associate commissioner Drew Speraw were the inspiration behind the idea.

Norlander reported that Thornton and Speraw commissioned Ken Pomeroy — creator of popular analytics site kenpom.com — to create an algorithm that rewards and/or punishes teams based on their performance against every team they face during the regular season.

It’s not just conference play that matters. And it’s not automatic that the team with the best conference record gets the No. 1 seed in the postseason tournament. Instead, things like strength of schedule, NET rankings, quality of wins, home or road contests and more make up a team’s WAC Résumé Seeding System.

Because the 14-team WAC plays an 18-team schedule, conference record will still be used to determine which 12 teams make the postseason tournament. Once that’s set, though, the 12 teams that get in will be seeded with the formula that aims, in part, to identify which teams took the most risk and reward them justly.

“The goal (is) ultimately to protect the highest résumé with the highest seeds,” Thornton told CBS Sports.

That move helps ensure — but does not guarantee — that the best teams in the WAC will get the best seeds in the postseason tournament and, therefore, the best path to earning a berth in the NCAA Tournament.

That, of course, is college basketball’s promised land, and that’s where conferences can bring home cold, hard cash for winning games.

These lower-tier conferences might not be in the position of the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12 and others to cash in on huge media rights deals. But that doesn’t mean that their end game is not to still make as much money for their athletic departments as possible.

This new approach is a creative way to helping make that happen, and it might soon be much more popular across all conferences.

[1]: https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/news/wac-altering-basketball-tournament-formats-by-introducing-bold-new-seeding-concept-based-on-advanced-analytics/

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Written By Matt Tait

A native of Colorado, Matt moved to Lawrence in 1988 and has been in town ever since. He graduated from Lawrence High in 1996 and the University of Kansas in 2000 with a degree in Journalism. After covering KU sports for the University Daily Kansan and Rivals.com, Matt joined the World Company (and later Ogden Publications) in 2001 and has held several positions with the paper and KUsports.com in the past 20+ years. He became the Journal-World Sports Editor in 2018. Throughout his career, Matt has won several local and national awards from both the Associated Press Sports Editors and the Kansas Press Association. In 2021, he was named the Kansas Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sports Media Association. Matt lives in Lawrence with his wife, Allison, and two daughters, Kate and Molly. When he's not covering KU sports, he likes to spend his time playing basketball and golf, listening to and writing music and traveling the world with friends and family.