But the current criteria don’t seem focused on putting the best teams in the tournament, but rather being able to rationalize who they're putting into the tournament.

I’m sorry, but if you’re 17-14, that either means you have a bunch of good losses or a bunch of bad losses. Either way, it’s a bunch of losses.

I also think the new methodology over-weights early in the year out of conference play. You’d think the ACC lost 11-3 in the ACC-B1G challenge by the way the system weights it.

I think by giving the same weight to a win or loss to the #49 team as the #4 team it exacerbates that overweighting.

I’d be curious to see a mathmatical analysis of the performance of the committee’s selections vs, say, Sagarin’s “Recent” ratings. My guess is the committee’s choices are worse than many of the computer rankings because as much as they claim “politics” doesn’t enter into their selections, the way the criteria have historically been established - through the various changes - ensures that politics enter into it.

In fact, the committee’s very existence is inherently political - and the only way to remove politics is to not have a committee, but rather utilize computer calculations. Or better yet, the consensus of the betting public.