CRAWFORD | The REAL explanation for Louisville's NCAA Tournament seeding | Sports

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- So I was driving the final leg of the trip back from Charlotte with Dalton Godbey of WDRB, where we spent the past five days covering Louisville in the ACC Tournament.

The CBS Men's NCAA Tournament Selection Show had begun, and we were watching on a phone when I heard the news that Louisville had been given a No. 8 seed and would face No. 9 seed Creighton in Lexington on Thursday, with the winner to face No. 1 overall seed Auburn.

Immediately came a rush of thoughts. Louisville No. 8? Creighton No. 9? Lexington? Porcini. You're going to have to keep reading to get to that one.

Creighton just played in the Big East Tournament championship and lost to a No. 2 seed in a virtual road game. Louisville just played in the ACC Tournament championship and lost to a No. 1 seed in a virtual road game.

I never thought I'd see the day where those kinds of teams would end up in an 8-9 matchup. I hopped out of the car at WDRB World Headquarters downtown and got into my own car to drive back to Hurstbourne Country Club to watch the NCAA Women's Show with Louisville coach Jeff Walz and his team and a couple hundred of their closest friends.

(A detour: On the way, I listened to Drew Deener and Bob Valvano on ESPN Radio in Louisville recounting their bad airline luck in getting back from Charlotte. I love you guys, but those are first-world media problems. We drove to Charlotte via the Knoxville-Asheville route and saw sections of interstate reduced to one lane each way because the rest of the road had crumbled into a valley. At one point, you had the destruction on one side and a wildfire on the other. Kind of adjusts your perspective. Craft service suspended on a flight? We had a rest stop at a place in Nitro, West Virginia, that wasn't exactly a health inspector's dream. Now, back to my NCAA takedown.)

The TV theory

Where was I? I got to the women's watch party and ran into Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg.

"What's with the No. 8 seed?" he says.

"I KNOW," I said. Then I laid my theory on him that all the 8-9 games look like made-for-TV deals to help juice the first-round viewership. I mean, your No. 8 seeds are Louisville, Gonzaga, UConn and Mississippi State. All of those are programs that have been to the Final Four. That's a pretty good group of teams. I don't know how fair it is, but it's good television, and that's what seems to matter most.

More or less.

Everybody had the same comment, as you'd expect in a room of hard-core Louisville fans.

"We got screwed," was a common comment. One guy followed with the additional comment, "What else is new?"

"I'm shocked that our men got an eight seed," Walz said. "I think it's an injustice to them."

Louisville athletic director Josh Heird, clearly, was working to measure his comments. He's on the women's selection committee. He knows how these things work. The best he could come up with was how many people before the draw hoped Louisville could be in Lexington.

"Well, we are in Lexington," he said.

A mathematical failure

Back on the radio, Deener, like me, related that he had, years ago, participated in the NCAA's mock draft tournament selection. You go through that, you can almost always find a rationale for where a team is seeded, no matter how torturous a process you have to go through.

But when he sought to explain Louisville as a No. 8 seed, based on its rankings in the analytics, he could come up with no mathematical explanation.

Rick Bozich, talking about the selection on WDRB, noted that of the 110 mock brackets at Bracket Matrix, compiled by people who study these things and the analytics all year, only two had Louisville as a No. 8 seed. Four had Louisville as a No. 4 seed, and 26 had the Cardinals as a No. 5 seed.

I'm with everybody. Louisville got a raw deal from the selection committee. Do I see any plausible explanation? I'm looking at the bracket, and Louisville won just three games against the field of 68: two over Clemson and one over North Carolina. That's pretty much it. It's all I can offer.

So what did the selection committee chair say? He was asked straight-up why was Louisville a No. 8 when only one other ACC Tournament runner-up has ever been seeded that low (North Carolina in 2022, which wound up in the title game.) The chairman, who happens to be Bubba Cunningham, AD at North Carolina, said this:

"Yeah, I think Louisville had a great year but I do think, when you take a look at our league, we ended up getting four teams into the tournament this year, obviously, Duke being the leader of teams out of the ACC, Clemson. Clemson beating Duke certainly raised their profile," Cunningham said. "As the committee looked at and put Louisville into the field and then we scrubbed them up and down the board, that's where the committee felt that they should be ranked this year, and then, obviously, we came in at the very end — in fact, we wouldn't have been in had Memphis lost in the American conference championship."

First off, how appropriate is it that when asked about Louisville, the NCAA selection committee chair basically winds up barely addressing Louisville in his answer and launches into a defense of North Carolina in the field, complete with a "we" reference.

It is a fact of this basketball season that most of college basketball doesn't think much of the ACC. It's also evident that the ACC must not think much of Louisville.

But second, and perhaps more important, is the "scrubbing" Cunningham refers to. In this process, the committee takes a group of two or three teams, and basically asks, "who is better in this group?" And it would appear, Louisville kept getting put into those groups and coming out on the lower end.

Which is how a team ranked No. 24 in the NCAA's own net rankings can wind up No. 29 on its seed list. And even that ranking would suggest a No. 7 seed, though perhaps the committee felt that playing in Lexington allowed it — as is the committee's right — to drop Louisville one spot.

Later on, Cunningham was asked about Louisville again, having not really explained the committee's rationale the first time. He expanded a bit.

"Yeah, every game matters, and I do think those (early-season) losses were tough losses for them, but they had a great year," he said. "Louisville is an outstanding team, and hats off to what they've been able to do, Pat Kelsey coming in there and turning that thing around. They had an outstanding year. Only one loss in Quad 2. But again, as I just mentioned just about five minutes ago, the quality of this field is really good, and when you're scrubbing teams up and down and trying to compare them, every last kind of blemish on your record might move you down a notch or a big win may move you up. I look forward to watching them in the tournament. I think they could have a great tournament."

The view of AI

Now, look. I'm a columnist. I work in Louisville. Maybe I'm biased. So I copied the questions and answers form the NCAA transcript in their entirety, and pasted them into ChatGPT with this question: "The following are two questions asked of NCAA men's basketball tournament selection committee chairman Bubba Cunningham (athletic director at North Carolina) on why Louisville received a poorer-than-expected tournament seed (and poorer than schools have historically gotten with their ranking, record and computer metrics.) Would you say Cunningham substantively answered the questions with specificity?"

The AI answer was this, and I include it verbatim: "Cunningham's responses are notably vague and lacking in specific justification for Louisville's seeding. Instead of addressing the historical precedent cited in the first question—where second-place ACC teams typically receive higher seeds—he broadly references the ACC getting only four tournament bids and says the committee "scrubbed" Louisville up and down the board, without explaining why they were placed where they were. The mention of Memphis in the American conference tournament is also a non sequitur, as it pertains to tournament qualification rather than seeding.

His response to the second question acknowledges that early-season blowout losses "mattered" but does not quantify their impact. He again falls back on generalities about the field being strong and seeding being a comparative process.

In short, he does not provide substantive, detailed reasoning for why Louisville's placement diverged from historical norms, leaving the key question largely unanswered."

None of that, however, is the real explanation for why the NCAA selection committee assigned Louisville a No. 8 seed in this year's NCAA Tournament.

The real explanation

The real explanation for this? Because it can.

That's all. The rules don't really matter. If you have selection guidelines, but don't have to follow them, or can suspend them under certain circumstances, or place them under a "scrubbing" process or an "eye test" at the end, then you have no guidelines. The guidelines are just for show.

It's telling that game officials will go to a video monitor and suspend play for five minutes to tell whose fingernail touched a ball last before it went out of bounds, but nobody gets to hear the selection committee discussions, or watch the group work.

And the fact is, if we could see those deliberations, most fan bases would not like the decisions any better. But maybe they would understand them, at least.

We live in a world where rules matter less every day. Where the more money you have, the more representation you have, the more your word means.

Sports has always represented a place where fair-play was valued and the level playing field was important. It's not level. It hasn't been for a long time. The ACC is being asked to sign off on a deal where the SEC and Big Ten get twice as many guaranteed playoff spots, because they have the most money, the most teams, and, surprise, the best teams.

Life is not fair. And neither are sports. I can't think of a year where a Louisville coach has been happy with his seed – except for 2009, when Louisville and Rick Pitino were the No. 1 overall seed. And you know how that worked out.

Twenty years ago this week, I covered Selection Sunday. At The Courier-Journal, we always had a 12-page section on the tournament, breaking down the brackets on the day after the draw was announced.

On that day in the newspaper, I wrote this lead to my Louisville story:

"At a cozy Selection Sunday reception in Porcini Restaurant, the announcement that the University of Louisville men's basketball team had received a No. 4 seed in the NCAA Tournament went over like a plate of cold linguini. Cardinals coach Rick Pitino had no explanation for how a team that is No. 6 in the polls and No. 12 in the RPI, won conference regular-season and tournament championships and ended the season with nine straight victories and 20 in its last 21 games couldn't be selected among the top 12 teams in the nation. But after three-years of lower than expected seeds, he wasn't surprised."

Pitino was so steamed that he talked to reporters for only two minutes before leaving.

Louisville, of course, wound up in the Final Four.

Survive and advance

Winning is the ultimate revenge.

And that's what Pat Kelsey and his team will try to do. I feel bad for them and for Louisville's fans because this day should have been a celebration about returning to the tournament. And it still should be. That joy should not be stolen.

No matter who Louisville played in the first round, it was going to be tough. This matchup will just be a bit tougher than expected. And the road is as tough as any in this tournament.

Kelsey, speaking to Mad Dog Radio on Sirius XM, said, "Keeping your eye a little bit as to what the Net says, KenPom says, what Bracketology says. We were pretty set on, hey we're going to be a six. There's a chance we're going to be a five, we seemed to be climbing. There were a few people, there was a whisper of a seven, and I was like, seven? We've lost two games in three months. We went 18-2 in the conference. We beat Clemson twice -- they got a five seed. Lost to the No. 1 team in the country in the finals of our conference tournament. When that popped up and it said eight, I was definitely surprised."

Did Louisville get screwed? Probably. Will the NCAA selection committee ever have to explain such a thing? Absolutely not. They don't call it "screwed." They call it "scrubbed."

In the end, you can't make sense of something that is just an arbitrary call. About all I can say to Louisville fans on a day they thought would be fun and instead wound up frustrating is this: Celebrate the tournament. Scrubbed is better than snubbed. It's not much better, but progress.

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