King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Billy Packer's mad about terrible treatment of the poor ACC. It must be Tournament time.

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March 17, 2008 | The NCAA Tournament field, announced Sunday, includes a staggering eight teams from one conference, the Big East. There are six teams each from the Pac-10, the Big 12 and the Southeastern Conference. The Atlantic Coast Conference, which according to the NCAA's Ratings Percentage Index, or RPI, was the best in the nation this year, only got four teams in.

They can deny it all they want, but you know as well as I do that the selection committee did that on purpose to get Billy Packer sputtering mad on national TV.

It worked, making Sunday's CBS telecast of the announcement as entertaining as it's been since -- well, since every year, because Packer's always mad about some slight to some ACC team, if not to the whole conference.

RPI is a formula that takes into account a team's winning percentage, its opponents' winning percentage, its opponents' opponents' winning percentage and its opponents' opponents' winning winning percentage percentage. Percentage.

Selection committee chairman Tom O'Connor, the athletic director at George Mason, sat at a table with Packer and his broadcast partner, Jim Nantz, and, biting his cheek so he wouldn't burst out laughing, listened as Packer grilled him about this terrible slight to the mighty ACC, lord and master of RPI.

"The Big East," Packer said, "the fifth conference in RPI, ended up getting eight teams, which ties the record. How do you justify the Atlantic Coast Conference being the No. 1 RPI conference and yet with only four teams."

The amusing thing about this question -- which sounds like a good question right up until you give it a yoctosecond's thought, at which point it sounds like a stupid question -- is that Packer is basing it on RPI, which he's been perfectly willing to dismiss as slide-rule hokum in the past when it showed that so-called mid-major conferences were gaining on the so-called majors.

Two years ago Missouri State of the mid-major Missouri Valley Conference, at No. 21, was the team with the highest RPI ranking ever left out of the Tournament. And what did Packer complain about that year? Too many mid-major teams in the Tournament.

"I didn't know how many teams came from a conference till I was coming down the elevator to come over here," O'Connor said, no doubt doing some quick figuring in his head to calculate how much he'd just won in side bets with other committee members about what Packer's first question would be. He explained that the committee works off of alphabetical lists of teams, not conference rosters, and that, while of course the members know who's in what conference, they're not thinking about that as they fill out the brackets.

Next page: Conferences don't get rewarded for having last-place teams that really aren't so bad