College basketball in February and early March is largely about numbers.  Fans and experts look at computer sheets to figure out who has a chance to make the NCAA Tournament, often making cumulative statements about teams based on raw numbers (bringing up such wonderful topics as non-conference strength of schedule and top-100 records).  What we often lose sight of is one very important question - are these teams any good?  Another argument has popped up against the subjective nature of the selection committee - they don't watch enough basketball to know who is good.

Now that I think about it, that would be the one question I would want to ask Dan Guerrero - is Team X good?  Have you seen them play?  This question would absolutely, positively elicit an uncomfortable response from the Chairman, and it just happens to be the most important question of the NCAA selection process.  There can be a lot of blathering about non-conference RPI's, strange mathematical formulas, and other nonsensical data used as an explanation for devaluing Northern Iowa, Murray State and Cornell, but there is no hiding a good team.  Because if the selection committee had seen Northern Iowa and Cornell play this year, they would have never seeded them where they did.

Northern Iowa, Murray State and Cornell aren't just good teams- they are excellent teams, winning 28-plus games and winning both their conference regular season and tournament titles.  And yet, they got treated the same as any other team out of their conferences in the NCAA Tournament.  There wasn't anything inherently special about Northern Iowa on paper, just an MVC champion with a couple more wins than usual.  But those people in the know - the ones who watch a lot of college basketball from every league - knew the type of team Northern Iowa was before they faced Kansas.  They execute their offense to perfection and get good shots on almost every possession.  They shoot well and don't turn the ball over.  They stay on their assignments on defense and make the other team execute a great play to score.  While I thought that Kansas's athletes would overwhelm the Panthers, it became clear after only ten minutes that Northern Iowa was going to win the game.  I had seen it a few times before - they grab a lead, they don't turn the ball over, and they make enough shots to keep their opponents constantly at an arm's length.  At a certain point, their opponent (and the discerning fan) finally figures it all out "Holy crap - we aren't going to be able to come back!"  And that's why Northern Iowa's wire to wire win over Kansas should not have come as a surprise to many people - they do this to everybody.  Its ironic that the committee's lazy ignorance of the qualititative merits of an oustanding Missouri Valley Conference champion led to the ousting of one of the biggest money-makers in the tournament.