Selection Sunday: Making sense of UCLA's inclusion in the field
The committee that determines the field and seeding for the NCAA tournament each season doesn't have an easy job. There are about 75 teams with resumes worth considering, an endless number of inputs to evaluate and, most notably, constant scrutiny no matter what decisions they come to.
Most years, the hours in the immediate aftermath of Selection Sunday are spent picking apart poorly-seeded teams, regions that are too strong or too weak, and so on. We've done a bit of that, too, in our Winners and Losers post, but 2015 has been a bit of a strange year in terms of bracket reaction.
This year, all anybody seems to want to talk about is UCLA.
The Bruins not only made the tournament unexpectedly but also avoided the play-in game, earning a No. 11 seed and a No. 42 overall rank from the committee. Fans of Florida, Colorado State, Temple and more are surely wringing their hands over the inclusion of Steve Aflford's squad, an inclusion that's quite puzzling on the surface.
UCLA finished their season 20-13 with an 11-7 record in Pac-12 play, marks that correctly had them in the conversation as a low seed. They didn't blow anyone away with their play, but they weren't abjectly terrible, either.
The biggest point in their favor was their quality of competition, a mark that ranked 26th in the country. Controlling for pace and opponent quality, they had the No. 45 offense and No. 76 defense, putting them at No. 41 in the KenPom rankings, right around where the committee ranked them.
Along with the strength of their schedule, Scott Barnes, chair of the selection committee, pointed to UCLA peaking at the right time and looking better down the stretch. And hey, the Bruins won four of their last five games, with three of those wins coming by double-digits and two coming by 20 points. They also narrowly lost to Arizona, the No. 6-ranked team in the tournament, on Friday.
Unfortunately for UCLA, losing to a top team is all too familiar, which is the main criticism against them. The Bruins beat Utah and Oregon at home but went 2-8 in true road games, 4-12 in road or neutral-court games and, most damning, they went 2-8 against top-50 opponents and 5-10 against top-100 opponents.
As far as bubble resumes go, performing so poorly against top competition is generally a death knell. It seems that simply playing Arizona close and beating up on dregs - their four-game winning streak came against Washington State (13-18), Washington (16-15) and USC (twice, 12-20), and they beat just one tournament-bound team in February or March - was what the committee was looking for in this case.
And it's really not the end of the world.
UCLA is a big-name program, which rubs some wrong but probably matters in a very marginal sense. They have a potential top-five pick in Kevon Looney that people will tune in to see and another potential NBA draft choice in Norman Powell. Bryce Alford is a fun player to watch, too. And much as they could beat SMU and maybe give Iowa State a run, their inclusion in the field doesn't threaten to drastically shake up the South Region.
But it still cost another, perhaps more deserving team a spot, and it's little surprise that the annual committee outrage has narrowed in on UCLA. A victory over SMU would go a long way toward justifying their selection and silencing those critics.