Teams to be given more credit for quality road wins. This came out a couple of weeks ago but I guess we all missed it. Part of the move away from the RPI as the main selection metric. It should encourage home-and-home games with quality teams instead of the neutral-court stuff we’ve been seeing lately.
They should also give relief for “bad” road losses, especially in conference. That’s one reason why they annually underseed quality mid-majors. It’s unreasonable to expect a team to run the table on the road in many mid-major conferences just to get a bid. I know a lot of power conference teams that make the tourney would have a couple of “bad” losses if they had to play, say, a CUSA road schedule.
I thought it was interesting how they’re using it this year but the corresponding metric apparently won’t be ready until 2018-19 season. So I wonder how they will distribute the data this season.
Sure, but what looks worse, a road loss or a neutral loss. And, what looks better a road win or a neutral win. The road game is better in both of those scenarios. Maybe it’s harder to get the win, sure, but there’s definitely more to gain with W on the road there is to lose with a L on the road. So just go that route every time.
A mix of road and neutral is best. If home wins count “1”, neutral wins “1.2” and true road games “1.4” (don’t know how they are weighted - just an example), I’d rather go 3-3, winning a pair at home, splitting on the neutral site and losing two on the road (total of 3.6 points using my example weighting), than to play all 6 on the road and lose all 6 (zero points).
I get why the Committee is rewarding "true road’ games over neutral games, but you’ve still got to win some games, or it doesn’t matter who you played, or where. And neutral court wins will still catch the Committee’s eye, as opposed to beating good teams at home, and losing to them on the road. After all, the Tournament is in (usually) neutral conditions.