NCAA March Madness change in rules for 2018?

June 3, 2018 2:06 PM

I read somewhere that the rules for March Madness 2018 had changed slightly, and that these changes gave Loyola an advantage and helped them get as far as they did. However, I can't find/don't know how to look for information about this. Is there a good resource for these rule changes and their effects on the 2018 tournament? Bonus points for something easy to read for someone who just got into college basketball this year.
posted by pxe2000 to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (2 answers total)

Best answer: Here’s a page from the NCAA including the last several years of rule changes. I don’t see anything particularly noteworthy. Here’s an explanation, but nothing jumps out at me.

There was some suggestion that the committee underseeded them (and the mid-major teams in general the last couple of years), making it look like more of an upset at first than it was, but the Final Four run was definitely an upset anyway.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 3:02 PM on June 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best answer: What you may be talking about aren't "rule" changes, but changes in how the selection committee picked teams and how they seeded them. Previously, the committee supposedly went almost completely by RPI, but they changed that this year to a set of "tiers" for games played by any given team that gave more weight to road and neutral court wins than home wins. So, before, top 50 RPI wins were really important. Now, a road win against a top 75 opponent, a neutral site win over a top 50 opponent, or a home win against a top 30 opponent all are tier 1 wins; the tiers increase by 25 or so in each category as you go to tiers 2 and 3. I might have the numbers wrong, but that's the gist of it. Here's an article by the NCAA itself about it, but unless you kind of know what RPI is already it might lose you.

When there was talk before the season or early on about the committee changing their criteria, there was a lot of hope that they'd start incorporating advanced metrics of some sort, so that things like Ken Pomeroy's efficiency ranking and other similar metrics might be used, but that didn't end up happening.
posted by LionIndex at 7:40 PM on June 3, 2018 [1 favorite]