Buzz went on a major rant after his NIT win regarding his team's omission from the NCAA tournament. When I heard him venting, I was really put off. But I thought I'd look into it and I tend to believe he is right at least with respect to Rutgers (maybe ND and WY). I looked at how Dayton, SMU, Oklahoma, Texas A&M, Notre Dame, Rutgers, and Wyoming were ranked in some of the major ranking systems (NET, RPI, Sagarin, Pomeroy, Massey) Three of the teams not in the tournament (TEX A&M, SMU, OKLA) were were better than Rutgers in every one of the five rankings - many were not very close. Here are the averages:

NET RPI SAG MAS POM AVG
DAYTON 58 57 61 65 43 57
SMU 45 43 40 46 56 46
OKLAHOMA 39 66 31 27 26 38
TEXAS A&M 43 59 51 45 44 48
RUTGERS 77 98 58 48 75 71
NOTRE DAME 53 55 54 49 52 52
WYOMING 50 35 84 68 61 60

How does Rutgers get in the tournament when they are clearly inferior to several teams that got left out?

In doing my research I also took note of how terrible the NET and RPI are as ranking systems. I believe the NET is a derivative of the RPI so maybe "garbage in, garbage out." The most obvious and egregious example of how bad NET and RPI are is Houston. Houston played Wisconsin and lost - that is the best team they played. They have played 6 QUAD 1 games - I don't think they played another top 25 team beside Wisconsin. So they played five games against teams in the 30 to 50 range in RPI and NET. Their record is 1-5! Their "signature" win is over Memphis but it is overshadowed by the fact that they also lost twice to Memphis. What does this resume get for Houston? #3 in RPI (that alone should be enough to throw this system in the trash can where it belongs) and #9 in NET (more garbage).

The tournament selection committee has a long history of making questionable/bad picks for the tournament. It is long past due for the selection to be turned over to the software gurus and let computers make the picks. Computers are far more capable of making the selection than people. The current NET system has a clunky four QUAD approach. A visiting team can get credit for a QUAD 1 win if it beats the #1 team or the #75 - doesn't matter. A simple computer program would be able to assign more points incrementally depending on how high the team you beat was ranked. Each win would be weighted appropriately according to the ranking of the team thus fine tuning how the result of each game affected a team's ranking. The computer ranking could incorporate anything the committee thinks is important and weight it appropriately. Computers are designed to "crunch" massive amounts of data and come up with the right answer - processing this much data is impossible for humans. They committee seems to have gotten half way there - let a computer give you NET data and then use it in some unknown way. But if they are going to let a program get them that close to the finish line, they should just give the entire job over to the computer. Sadly, the tool that they use, the NET data is extremely flawed and any conclusions based on the NET data will also be flawed. And Rutgers gets in the tournament.