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The 2004 Tournament Field

In the end, it's not that it's unfair, although it is, or that it's morally wrong, although it is, or that it hurts the game and its development, although it does. It's that it's boring. They keep making the same mistakes or doing the same wrong things, take your pick, every year, and it just gets tiresome after a while rather than enraging. It doesn't rise to the level of full-scale evil, so the phrase "the banality of evil" doesn't really apply, but I keep envisioning Charlie Carr and Skip Bertman dressed as the character Phil, Prince of Insufficient Light, from Dilbert, complete with floppy suit and giant spoon. Probably best to let that one go. Anyone who wants the full rant can go read the 2001 tournament field discussion.

How much originality would it have taken, though, just to switch Washington and Arizona State? Everyone at ASU is probably quite confused at this point by actually being seeded correctly, and it would have avoided that dreadful repeat of both of the Stanford-Beach and Fullerton-ASU matchups.

I'll have a table included in my discussion of each regional, so I need to describe the columns.

W-L -- Won-loss record
RPI -- Pseudo-RPI ranking
ISR -- ISR ranking
Probs -- The probability of the team winning the regional, super-regional, and championship, respectively, according to the method based on ISR gaps I usually use.

                          W-L   RPI  ISR   Probs

Texas                    50-13    2    2   80/62/19
Oral Roberts             45-9    36   29   13/ 6/ 0
Texas Christian          38-24   42   43    8/ 3/ 0
Youngstown State         20-30  227  228    0/ 0/ 0

Everyone's seeded right, Texas is #1a in the country at this point, so they're a defensible national number one seed, and TCU got in by taking it out of the committee's hands. Nothing more to see here, move along.

                          W-L   RPI  ISR   Probs

Virginia                 42-13   16   31   38/10/ 0
Vanderbilt               42-17   13   14   54/18/ 2
George Mason             39-17   50   76    6/ 0/ 0
Princeton                27-18  126  138    1/ 0/ 0

The top two seeds are switched for no reason at all that I can see, but George Mason's not really good enough to make that a major problem. The RPI tends to result in overseeding for the ACC and SEC teams, but that's not really the biggest problem for some of the improperly omitted Western teams; it's bids for undeserving mid-major teams from the Southeast. I count four this year. The odd thing is that George Mason can't even really be justified by the RPI; they're just there because of this odd fetish by the committee. Everyone talks about it as if it came down to a choice between George Mason and, say, Auburn, as though it were a case of rich SEC team selfishness, but it's not -- it's a choice between George Mason and Oregon State or Cal Poly, and we're the poorer for it.

                          W-L   RPI  ISR   Probs

Arkansas                 46-14   12   17   54/30/ 2
Wichita State            47-14   37   32   28/13/ 1
Missouri                 37-21   53   49   17/ 7/ 0
LeMoyne                  36-19  144  150    1/ 0/ 0

Arkansas as a national seed? Which nation? Missouri presumably played themselves in this week at Nebraska's expense, which is just silly; it's another example of the kind of false dichotomies the committee sets up for themselves. All told, it leaves us with a really blah-looking field here.

                          W-L   RPI  ISR   Probs

Florida State            42-20    6   19   55/29/ 2
Oklahoma State           37-22   31   28   30/15/ 1
Central Florida          44-16   35   54   15/ 5/ 0
Bethune-Cookman          27-26  199  206    0/ 0/ 0

At least they didn't go overboard on honoring the RPI with FSU. I'm curious about how much effect the late finish to the ACC tournament had. The super pairing here is really bad, since there's not really a team in the eight who deserves as clear a shot at Omaha as they have.

                          W-L   RPI  ISR   Probs

Georgia Tech             41-19   10   20   45/26/ 1
Texas Tech               38-19   30   30   29/16/ 1
Mississippi State        34-22   27   36   24/12/ 0
Jacksonville State       31-27  144  136    1/ 0/ 0

You know, when I saw the national seed, I just assumed that it was RPI-based; I didn't actually notice until now that it's not even justifiable through those means. 19-game winning streaks are not to be sneezed at, but they should be taken in context better than this.

                          W-L   RPI  ISR   Probs

Georgia                  38-20   11   21   42/23/ 1
Clemson                  36-24   17   39   27/12/ 0
Birmingham-Southern      44-16   40   53   19/ 8/ 0
Middle Tennessee State   40-20   59   64   12/ 4/ 0

And another dull one. Did you notice that we've now gone two consecutive super pairings and five straight regionals with no team with a better than 2% chance of winning it all? Middle Tennesse is the best of the four seeds, which should not be confused as a sign that there's actually any reason for them to be here; it's probably a good argument for play-in series.

                          W-L   RPI  ISR   Probs

Stanford                 44-12    9    1   71/56/20
Long Beach State         36-19   26    8   27/16/ 2
St. John's               36-21   54   73    1/ 0/ 0
Nevada-Las Vegas         37-22  112   74    1/ 0/ 0

So, you have two teams who are head and shoulders above everyone else in the country. What do you do? Obviously, you put them in the same bracket if they get to Omaha, silly. How you feel about the Long Beach placement probably depends on how much you believe in momentum. Although it makes sense, I've never been able to find much evidence that hot or cool streaks late in the season tend to transfer to the postseason, so I think this is patently unfair.

                          W-L   RPI  ISR   Probs

Notre Dame               49-10   19   25   32/ 7/ 0
UC Irvine                34-21   32   15   34/10/ 1
Arizona                  30-24   38   16   33/10/ 1
Kent State               35-25  105  126    1/ 0/ 0

This is easily the best matchup of the regionals, which has nothing to do with fairness; Arizona as a #3 seed is a cruel joke. Even worse is that the winner, which has a 2/3 chance of being a Western team, gets shipped back out to Stanford.

                          W-L   RPI  ISR   Probs

South Carolina           45-15    4    9   66/39/ 4
North Carolina           41-19   33   45   20/ 7/ 0
Coastal Carolina         40-21   39   61   10/ 3/ 0
The Citadel              38-26   82   91    3/ 0/ 0

Depending on how you feel about Long Beach (see above), you could make a decent case for South Carolina as a national seed, although not quite as high as #4. It's hard to see UNC as a two seed, though, so there's essentially no competition here. The saving grace is that the super pairing looks tasty.

                          W-L   RPI  ISR   Probs

East Carolina            48-11   15   11   69/39/ 4
Tennessee                37-22   23   37   25/10/ 0
UNC-Wilmington           38-21   43   72    6/ 1/ 0
Stony Brook              29-25  169  177    0/ 0/ 0

See the above comment on competition, although Tennessee's at least a little better than North Carolina. ECU falls into the group of teams wishing this week that there hadn't been a conference tournament (see also LSU, Ole Miss, Texas State).

                          W-L   RPI  ISR   Probs

Arizona State            40-16    3    3   56/34/ 7
Cal State Fullerton      36-20   20    7   36/19/ 3
Minnesota                38-21   51   59    5/ 1/ 0
Pepperdine               28-30  138   66    3/ 1/ 0

The story from this season that may have the longest-term impact on the game is Arizona State's schedule. After years of mistreatment by the committee, they took matters into their own hands by scheduling series against Florida State, East Carolina, and Tulane instead of against equally-good Western teams, and have a #3 RPI to show for it instead of the #12-#15 or so that scheduling the Western teams would have netted them. It's not exactly what I've talked about as gaming the RPI, but it's awfully close. In this case, the team actually deserves their ranking, so I'm OK with it; it'll be interesting to see if other Western powerhouses follow suit. The grey cloud behind the silver lining, of course, is that they still got sent to Fullerton and still have to face Washington, most likely, in the supers.

                          W-L   RPI  ISR   Probs

Mississippi              39-19    8   13   37/15/ 1
Washington               37-18   22    5   52/27/ 5
Tulane                   38-19   47   44   11/ 3/ 0
Western Kentucky         34-26  110  104    1/ 0/ 0

Remember when the NorPac teams were going to be added so that the SixPac teams could get some breathing room from beating up on each other? It's probably time to add Washington to Wichita State and Rice on the list of case studies of how to build great programs under difficult circumstances.

                          W-L   RPI  ISR   Probs

Miami, Florida           44-11    1    6   73/46/ 6
North Carolina State     35-22   21   47   14/ 5/ 0
Florida Atlantic         45-15   25   48   14/ 5/ 0
St. Bonaventure          29-20  187  191    0/ 0/ 0

Miami's come on strong and deserve a seeding somewhere around what they got, something I didn't think I'd be saying a few weeks ago. It's still hard to see them winning it all, but they do have the advantage of having Texas and Stanford on the other side of the bracket. Someone recently challenged me on using the phrase "seeded into Omaha"; this is what it looks like. The toughest team between the Hurricanes and Rosenblatt is #18 Florida.

                          W-L   RPI  ISR   Probs

Florida                  40-20    5   18   43/20/ 1
Oklahoma                 37-22   24   22   28/12/ 1
UCLA                     33-27   49   23   28/12/ 1
CCSU                     41-15   95  132    1/ 0/ 0

At least they didn't go in straight RPI order this year; I'm sure Florida's a bit displeased about that. It's nice to see UCLA here; it's a baby step, but those are worth something.

                          W-L   RPI  ISR   Probs

Rice                     43-12   14    4   58/37/ 6
Texas A&M                39-19   18   12   26/14/ 1
Lamar                    41-14   41   26   16/ 7/ 0
Texas Southern           18-33  249  262    0/ 0/ 0

Rice is another case of them ignoring the RPI's to our benefit. I talk about the California regionals a lot, but some of the Texas regionals are starting to resemble those bloodbaths; all three of the top seeds here deserved better.

                          W-L   RPI  ISR   Probs

Louisiana State          41-17    7   10   59/28/ 3
Southern Mississippi     44-17   28   24   29/11/ 1
College of Charleston    45-14   46   57   11/ 2/ 0
Army                     37-13  107  128    1/ 0/ 0

Although Skip Bertman has taken much heat over his service on the committee (and he deserves an equal share of criticism with the other members for the continuing mismanagement of the last couple of years), it's worth noting that, even with the 2-and-q last week, LSU could have been a national seed and no one would have even batted an eye. An LSU-Rice super is one of the more interesting possible matchups out there.

                          W-L   RPI  ISR

Oregon State             33-23   66   27
Nebraska                 36-23   29   33
San Diego                35-21   72   34
Washington State         30-26   62   35
UC Riverside             33-24   70   38
Cal Poly                 38-23   79   40
Southern California      24-32   45   41
Loyola Marymount         32-22   88   42

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you. This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have caught my eye -- the general threshold for listing is 120 actual pitches or 130 estimated, although short rest will also get a pitcher listed if I catch it. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.

(*) Pitch count is estimated.

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About the author, Boyd Nation