WAC to Seed Conference Tournament Using KenPom Ratings, per Report

The Western Athletic Conference is changing how it seeds its men’s and women’s postseason basketball tournaments by introducing a system that will not only judge teams off of wins and losses, but also through an algorithm that will reward–and/or punish–teams based on their performances against all of their regular season opponents.

According to Matt Norlander of CBS Sports, the WAC is believed to be the first conference to introduce a conference tournament seeding method that will incorporate advanced analytics. That is to say, a team that finished second in the regular season standings, according to wins and losses, may be ranked worse than No. 2 seed when the conference tourney arrives and a program that ends with the seventh-best regular season record could be bumped up, depending on the algorithm. 

WAC commissioner Brian Thornton and associate commissioner Drew Speraw revealed to Norlander that they commissioned Ken Pomeroy, founder of college basketball ranking database KenPom.com, to create a formula that would take into account the entirety of a team’s season, from November to March. What came out of the discussions between conference leadership and Pomeroy was the WAC Résumé Seeding System.

“The goal [is] ultimately to protect the highest résumé with the highest seeds,” Thornton told CBS Sports. “As we were coming up with this strategic plan from a basketball standpoint–which was one of my big tasks when I came here–nonconference scheduling always came up. … And ultimately, it becomes very hard to penalize people for what you’re able to do from a nonconference scheduling standpoint.”

In the new system, a WAC team will receive more credit if it plays a difficult opponent and wins than it will if it plays a weaker opponent and still wins. Conversely, if a WAC team loses to a tough opponent, it will not be punished as severely as it will if it loses to a weaker opponent.

The algorithm will account for where games are played and will be based on the NCAA’s NET ranking, which is the selection committees’ primary tool for sorting and seeding the NCAA’s basketball tournaments.

“Essentially, what we came up with was a way to utilize the NET in order to provide the reward/penalties for a particular game,” Speraw told CBS Sports. “It’s weighted depending on where the game is at, just as the committee would look at it, and so it’s a system where, essentially, we’re trying to promote Quad 1, Quad 2 games. And so when you look at it, not every game is worth the same inside Quad 1, Quad 2, just as the committee would look at that. Obviously, a top-10 win is not the same as a top-30 win. Similar, but not the same.”

Pomeroy revealed to CBS Sports that every regular season game will have a valuation of 1.0 and each game’s result will affect a team’s overall rating. A win will add to a program’s total score, whereas a loss would deduct from the running amount.

Based on Pomeroy’s algorithm, a win over the top-ranked team in NET would result in the following amount of points for a WAC team:

Road win: +.978 points
Neutral win: +.960
Home win: + .930

A loss against the No. 1 team, which wouldn’t result in as negative of a result because of the difficulty of the opponent, would look as such:

Road loss: -.022 points
Neutral loss: -.040
Home loss: -070

However, if a WAC team were to lose to a team ranked No. 300 in NET, the deduction would be -.862. Because the opponent would be considered less difficult, a loss would lead to a harsher drop in points.

According to Norlander, all of the pluses and minuses from regular season games in the WAC will be tallied each day and reflected in the league’s official standings page. When the regular season comes to an end, teams will be seeded based on their overall points number in the WAC Résumé Seeding System, with the higher numbers earning the better seeds.

Last year, three teams–New Mexico State, Seattle and Stephen F. Austin– tied for first in the WAC regular season standings. However, if the formula were to have been applied, New Mexico State would have earned the No. 1 seed with 6.81 points. Grand Canyon, which finished tied for fourth in the conference based on record, would have been the second seed (3.82) and Stephen F. Austin (3.53) and Seattle (2.64) would have been No. 3 and No. 4, respectively.

Though the system will surely need a few tweaks once it’s implemented next season, the WAC could be the first league to start a movement toward the use of analytics-based conference tournament seeding.