It’s that time of the year again.
Local high school basketball teams from all over the Bay Area learned their seeding and division brackets for the state playoffs on Sunday, and will begin the most anticipated postseason high basketball tournament starting this week.
The ultimate goal: Playing at the Golden 1 Center in Sacramento for a state championship on March 14-15.
The brackets won’t always be perfect and some teams will fare far better than others.
The CIF uses a competitive equity model for seeding that ranks teams from best to worst and divides them into separate divisions with the Open brackets being where the state’s strongest teams are placed. From there, the next 16 highest-ranked teams are placed into Division I and on down through Division V.
The top seed in every division will receive home games throughout the playoffs while the No. 16 seed will have to go on the road for four games in order to make it to Golden 1 Center.
The King’s Academy (Division III) and Priory (Division IV) were awarded top seeds after winning their respective CCS titles. California was given the No. 16 seed in Division I, despite being an NCS Open Division team.
On the girls side, the only school to receive a top NorCal seed from the Bay Area News Group’s coverage area was small Summit Shasta in Division V. The Daly City school will host No. 16 Skyline in its first round matchup.
There was a lot of talk throughout the season on whether or not Central Section and national powerhouse St. Joseph-Santa Maria would be placed in the NorCal Open Division. Riordan, De La Salle and Salesian won’t have to worry about St. Joseph star and California’s all-time leading scorer Tounde Yessoufou as the Knights were given the No. 2 seed in the SoCal Open.
While the release of the playoff brackets can never make anyone happy, CIF associate executive director Brian Seymour spoke with the Bay Area News Group on Sunday night to address some of the decisions the CIF made during this process.
Here’s the highlights:
Nathan Canilao: CIF went with five boys NorCal Open teams. Many thought St. Joseph-Santa Maria had a chance to be a NorCal team since just two years ago they were considered a northern team. What was the rationale behind putting St. Joseph in the south and having just five NorCal teams in the Open?
Brian Seymour: We just felt that the area that they are coming from, it makes more sense for them to play in the south than it does to play in the north. We (placed them in the North) before and it was a lot of time on the road for a lot of those teams. It just makes more sense we do that with almost every single one our section teams in the Central and try to divide them up geographically whenever possible. … There was also some discussion on the boys side on whether or not Inderkum should have been in the boys open and we spent a lot of time on that as well.
Nathan Canilao: On the girls side, Acalanes received the No. 4 seed in the Open and Pinewood was given the No. 6. Both teams lost their section title games, but it certainly seemed Pinewood was more competitive against Mitty, the division’s top seed. Was there any consideration to putting Pinewood ahead of Acalanes?
Brian Seymour: Ultimately, we kind of have a good idea well before the games are actually played. It was a surprise of the score differential between San Ramon Valley and Acalanes. Not a surprise at all that SRV won, but you normally don’t see that. We saw really close games between Pinewood and Mitty. The committee looks at all that, and they try to make certain that there’s no repeats of a section final. So a lot of that shifting in the brackets has something to do with that, but that’s where they settled on with those schools on the girls side.
Nathan Canilao: How much stock is put in the section championship games and if a team has a lopsided loss, how does that factor into how they are seeded?
Brian Seymour: Not as much as everyone thinks. If you’re a team in the Big Ten tournament and you’re the No. 1 team in the nation and you lose in the quarterfinals, you’re still going to be a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. So, we look at the whole body of work. It’s not just necessarily one game. You got to see how teams are playing at this time in the year. That has something to do with it as well.
Nathan Canilao: Dougherty Valley’s boys team got a higher seed in the NorCal D1 bracket as an NCS Division I champion over California and Liberty – two teams that were in the NCS Open Division. Did you think the NCS just got it wrong and that it needed to be corrected for the state playoffs?
Brian Seymour: The NCS for the first time is using the computer rankings to determine the placement of their teams. So whenever you have something new, you have to go through it for a couple of years to fix the bugs that are presented when you’re just using the computer. We don’t use just computers only for the state, but we do use a number of different computer methods and metrics. But for the case of the NCS, the computer spitted out the ranking and it had Dougherty Valley on the outside of its six-team open division. And so once Dougherty Valley played extremely well in Division I, and Cal high and Liberty were early exits out of the NCS Open, the North Coast Section saw that and said, ‘Hey, you know what, this is an opportunity to go ahead and put a team that’s playing really well right now up above.’”
Nathan Canilao: Dougherty Valley did get the No. 6 seed in Division I and right behind them is Dublin at No. 7. Dublin did have a head-to-head win over Dougherty Valley and won a game in the NCS Open Division. Why was Dougherty Valley given the nod?
Brian Seymour: Dougherty just played really good basketball and the committee felt like that’s where they had earned their way into that spot.