Just click here to access the EnvEcon group at ESPN.com. The password is: capntrade. You need to create an ESPN.com account to join, but it's relatively painless and you can opt out of all the spam.
And for those of you who are tired of sports related posts:
- Tough noogies. It's my party and I'll cry if I want to.
- 65 teams. 64 games. 11 days. One champion. The NCAA Basketball Tournament will remain the best sporting event on the planet (World Cup?....pffft) until the NCAA gets its collective head out of its collective rear and realizes the attraction of a DI NCAA Football Tournament.
- At least we can relate it to economics:
Damn economists have to ruin everything.In the minutes after the NCAA selection committee announced this year's tournament bracket on Sunday night, the most curious decisions became instant debate fodder. On CBS, SI's Seth Davis wondered aloud about the respect given to the Pac-10 -- a relatively weak conference this season -- in the form of a No. 8 seed for regular-season champ Cal. On ESPN, Dick Vitale railed against the committee for awarding Wake Forest an at-large bid and leaving out Virginia Tech, which had a better overall record, a better ACC record and a head-to-head win against the Demon Deacons.
Had either read a soon-to-be published study by three economists, they might not have been so surprised.
The study, by Jay Coleman, Mike DuMond and Allen Lynch, looked at selection data from 10 tournaments (1999-2008) and found that when seeding the tournament, membership in one of the six BCS conferences is worth an average of an extra 1.75 seeds. The study also found that having a conference representative on the 10-member selection committee resulted not only in a higher seed but also in a better chance of getting an at-large bid. According to the authors, a true bubble team (one with a 50-50 chance of getting in or being left out) would have a 49 percent better chance of getting in if its athletic director is on the committee, a 41 percent better chance if its conference commissioner was on the committee and a 23 percent better chance if a fellow conference AD is a member of the committee.
According to the researchers, Wake Forest would have beaten out Virginia Tech this year even after removing the controls for selection committee bias. Hokies fans should be angrier about their team's abysmal out-of-conference schedule, but it probably didn't escape their notice that Wake Forest athletic director Ron Wellman is a member of the selection committee.The study's authors aren't accusing Wellman or any other selection committee member of deliberately rigging the process. In fact, they realize Wellman wouldn't have even been allowed in the room when the committee voted to grant Wake Forest an at-large bid, nor would he have been allowed to offer an opinion on fellow ACC member Virginia Tech. What the authors are suggesting is that the selection process setup allows unconscious biases to creep into the proceedings.
"We're accusing the committee of being human," said Coleman, a professor at the University of North Florida. "It's human nature. We all are biased at some level."
