After wins over Purdue, Maryland and Wisconsin to capture the Big Ten Tournament title, Michigan was rewarded by the selection committee with a No. 5 seed. …
In the South Region in the same pod as No. 1 overall seed Auburn. …
Seeded worse than every opponent it defeated this week. …
Despite more Quad 1 wins than all but three teams in the field. …
Suddenly, rewarded with a 5 seed doesn’t seem the right word.
Michigan fans: If you’re upset, this is a safe space. I hear you. The Wolverines beat Wisconsin twice — yet were seeded two spots below the Badgers and five total spots lower on the seeds list. They had double the Quad 1 wins than St. John’s — yet the Johnnies earned a No. 2 seed.
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What gives?
if evaluating performance based on quads were the end-all be-all, then Saquon Barkley would be the highest-paid player in NFL history and Auburn would have already been crowned champion before the tournament got underway. But Michigan’s resume is overwhelmingly more impressive than every team it faced this week: Five more Quad 1 wins than Maryland and Wisconsin; three more than Purdue. That’s not to mention a WAB (wins above bubble) that lapped the other teams it beat this week.
| NCAAT seed | Team | Record | WAB | Quad 1 | Quad 2 | Quad 3 | Quad 4 | Net ranking |
| 4 | Maryland | 25-8 | 19 | 8-7 | 6-1 | 3-0 | 8-0 | 10 |
| 3 | Wisconsin | 26-9 | 11 | 8-8 | 10-1 | 2-0 | 6-0 | 15 |
| 4 | Purdue | 22-11 | 20 | 7-10 | 9-1 | 2-0 | 4-0 | 19 |
| 5 | Michigan | 25-9 | 10 | 12-7 | 4-2 | 7-0 | 2-0 | 23 |
It begs the obvious question: Did the selection committee pre-determine Michigan’s seed before Sunday afternoon’s Big Ten Tournament title game win over Wisconsin?
Matt Norlander posed that to Bubba Cunningham, the selection committee’s chairman, on CBS Sports HQ.
“No, that’s always the last tournament that completes,” Cunningham said. “We had contingency brackets based on Wisconsin winning or based on Michigan winning, and they did get scrubbed up assuming they had won in the contingency bracket that we had reviewed.
“That game was important,” Cunningham added. “And it was considered by the entire committee.”
Cunningham was also asked if the newly-added WAB metric — which aims to quantify a team’s win total against the number a bubble team would expect against the same schedule — played any role in discussions surrounding teams this year.
Cunningham said it did. Michigan finished No. 10 in WAB.
No bracket is perfect and there are different metrics to make cases for different teams depending upon your angle. But Michigan’s 3-seed resume being bumped to a 5-seed on the bracket is the type of outcome that would make sense a week ago before the Big Ten Tournament but is hard to defend after what the Wolverines accomplished this week.
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