To say the North Coast Section got its basketball playoffs wrong would be an understatement.
In the age of artificial intelligence and expert systems, the committee relied on computers and numbers. The outcome was supposed to create an equal and fair brackets, but instead the system created more havoc.
The numbers lied.
In this year’s new format, Dougherty Valley, a team that finished the regular season 20-8 and was unequivocally one of the six best teams in the NCS, was bumped down to the Division I bracket.
The two teams that got the nod ahead of the San Ramon school in the Open Division were Liberty and California, the latter of which Dougherty Valley beat by 29 and 16 points.
Under the new format that relies heavily on MaxPreps’ computer rankings, the top six teams in the NCS rankings are automatically placed in the Open Division. Head-to-head can be considered to determine seeding, but only in a team’s respective division.
That left Dougherty Valley on the outside looking in, despite beating California twice and a strength of schedule nearly eight points higher than Liberty, which was seeded fifth, one spot ahead of California.
Now, Dougherty Valley’s path to a CIF NorCal berth has gotten exponentially tougher. All six Open teams automatically advance to the regionals. In Division I, the Wildcats have to reach the final (that’ll take three victories) or win a third-place game should they lose in the semifinals.
While computer rankings should be a factor in determining whether a team qualifies for the Open, the NCS’s new format sends a clear and bad message: The human element has been taken out of the conversation and we must trust that the all mighty computer with its fancy numbers and complex equations will make the perfect bracket.
But the reality is the numbers don’t bear out what the eye test tells us. A team with arguably a Top-5 player in the Bay Area (Jalen Stokes) and a resume that includes marquee wins over De La Salle (regular season) and California (twice) was left out by a non-human judge.
Aside from the exclusion of Dougherty Valley in the Open Division, there are other problems that have made this year’s brackets flawed.
Out of the 96 boys teams, 18 that qualified had losing records. On the girls side, 11 of 86 teams had sub-.500 records.
According to NCS commissioner Pat Cruickshank, teams could qualify for NCS by having a .500 or better record overall, in league, or in their base division.
“If you did away with one of them you’d have less teams with losing records but also less than full brackets,” Cruickshank told the Bay Area News Group on Sunday. “This gives more of our students an opportunity to compete in the championships.”
While allowing more teams to compete is a noble reason to keep the system, why are we rewarding programs that can’t end the regular season with a winning record? Why should the playoffs expand if the teams being let in probably shouldn’t be there in the first place?
All of this has made Sunday’s seeding release one of the most head-scratching in recent NCS memory.
But there is hope that this will be a one-year issue.
The NCS has shown the willingness to change on the fly and listen to feedback from coaches and athletic programs.
Cruickshank said discussions have already begun on possible changes to the system for next year.
“We’ve been talking about some adjustments, we will see what our schools want to do,” he said.