The WIAA Asks: How Complicated Can We Make A 16-Team Tournament?

The WIAA announced sweeping changes to the high-school state basketball tournament earlier this week. I have some thoughts.

First, here’s the precise language from the WIAA on what the new system will look like:

“Sixteen teams per classification will play at regional sites on Friday or Saturday of week one. Four games involving the top eight seeds based on RPI rankings will be played with the winner advancing to the second round at the Championship site with a bye while the losing team still advances to the first round at the Championship site. The other four games involving seed Nos. 9-16 will be loser-out contests. Winners of those games will play the losers of the four games involving seed Nos. 1-8. Round 1 games of week two (Wednesday) will be single elimination and the tournament will continue with an eight-team modified double elimination format in rounds 2-4 (Thursday-Saturday) of week two. Six trophies will be awarded per gender per classification.”

Here’s what it looks like in visual form (No. 1 refers to the top-seeded team by RPI, L1 refers to the loser of game number one, etc.):

The new setup is obviously in contrast to the current system, in which sixteen teams per classification are placed by a somewhat arbitrary process focused on geographical concerns into eight different regional games, with the eight winners all advancing to state and the eight losers all going home.

The impetus for this change is to give more teams the chance to advance to the final state championship site (either Tacoma, Yakima or Spokane), which is a noble goal. The point of high-school sports is to give kids something fun to do and maybe teach a few life lessons along the way, and nothing’s more fun than going to the state. In this regard, the WIAA’s new plan is a success. That’s the most important thing.

But the new system also creates some serious inequities that will make it much more difficult for lower-seeded teams (and thus, likely, teams outside major population centers that don’t play as difficult a schedule) to win. It also places an incredible amount of importance on the WIAA’s RPI formula, which will be calculated using a notoriously faulty data set. For kids confused by the byzantine system, maybe this is one of those life lessons I was talking about: bureaucracies tend to breed inefficiency.

The details

OK, so let’s get down to it. As far as the regular season is concerned, I don’t think the new system will change much, with the possible exception of teams from outlying areas going to greater lengths to schedule difficult non-league games. There should be zero risk of tanking or anything like that to manipulate the RPI. District tournaments will continue to proceed exactly as they have in years past, serving as the mechanism that will decide which sixteen teams move on to regionals.

It’s once we have those sixteen teams that things start to get wonky.

To recap: They’ll be ranked, one through sixteen, by the new RPI formula, of which 25% will be determined by a school’s winning percentage, 50% by the winning percentage of a school’s opponents, and 25% by the winning percentage of those opponents’ opponents. The teams ranked one through eight will be given automatic berths into the new twelve-team state tournament. In the regional round, the No. 1 seed will play No. 8, the No. 2 seed will play No. 7, etc., with the four winners advancing straight through to the state quarterfinals. The teams ranked nine through sixteen will play loser-out games (No. 9 vs. No. 16, No. 10 vs. No. 15, etc.) at various regional sites, with the four winners advancing to state and the four losers going home.

In the quote-unquote “first round of state,” the winners of the four loser-out games will play the losers of the four winner-to-the-quarterfinals games.

This means there is a massive, massive difference between finishing No. 8 in the final RPI rankings and finishing No. 9. The team that’s ranked eighth needs to win just four games to win the state title, which means it is essentially in a 16-team tournament in terms of how many games it must win. If we assume every game is a 50-50 toss-up (not a totally fair assumption, but it works for our purposes here), that means the No. 8 seed has a 6.25% chance of winning state. And that’s not even counting the fact the No. 8 seed can afford to lose its regional game and still stay alive for the ultimate prize.

The No. 9 seed, meanwhile, must win five games in a row to win state, which means it is effectively part of a 32-team tournament. Assuming all games are toss-ups, the No. 9 seed has just a 3.125% chance of bringing home the state title, fully half of the No. 8 seed’s odds, and it won’t have the luxury of losing its regional game and remaining in the chase. Earning the No. 8 seed (or the No. 7 seed, or the No. 6 seed) more than doubles a team’s odds of winning state compared to the No. 9 seed (or the No. 10 seed, or the No. 11 seed).

One might argue that this is only fair: That the best teams in the regular season should have the best chance of performing well in the playoffs. This, in some ways, was the primary argument for adding an RPI component in the first place: To ensure matchups between two top-five teams are avoided during the regional round and that the most deserving teams make it to state. The way the new system favors the top eight teams means the RPI rankings will be a major factor in who advances how far—not just a mechanism for setting up even matchups.

But are we sure the RPI will really be rewarding the best teams?

I have my concerns. One is that the RPI, so heavily influenced by strength of schedule, will favor teams in population-dense areas where the competition is better over equally talented teams that, by virtue of their location, are forced to play an easier slate. It’s easy to imagine a league champion from central Washington ending the season ranked No. 9 in the RPI, and thus facing a much more difficult road than the third-place finisher in a more difficult league that finished in the RPI top eight. It could be debated whether that would be a good or a bad thing.

My other, more major concern is that the RPI will be based upon scores for games as listed on MaxPreps. As anyone who’s spent much time around high school sports could tell you, the MaxPreps site is famously inconsistent, at least in Washington. Some schools have no games entered on their schedules. Sometimes they have half their games. Some schools have the same game on their schedule two or three times. Sometimes the final score is wrong. Sometimes two schools have different scores listed for the same game. I imagine (I hope) that some efforts are being undergone to ensure more accurate data, but color me skeptical that the RPI will be using a perfect dataset to calculate its rankings.

In Oregon, the OSAA requires schools to report all scores to its official website (with penalties for those who don’t comply) and uses its own internal data to calculate the rankings used to seed postseason play. That’s a much more foolproof system. Counting on often-faulty data from a third party seems like a recipe for controversy.

A final, more aesthetic complaint: Why on Earth does this thing have to be so complicated? The WIAA’s mock bracket looks like this, but take another look at this more accurate representation of how the tournament will actually shape up:

In my two decades as a bracket connoisseur, I’ve never seen anything quite like it, where a team can lose in the round of 16 and … simply move to a different spot in the round of 16. It really makes clear the inequity between the teams seeded nine through sixteen and those seeded one through eight.

I imagine the WIAA will still technically refer to all of those games on the weekend before state as the “regional round,” but in reality, the Nos. 1 through 8 seeds are playing in the state round of 16 while the Nos. 9 through 16 seeds are in play-in games. The WIAA will refer to the games between the winners of these play-in games and the losers of the early round-of-16 games “the first round,” but in reality, it’s just the second half of the round of 16 that began a week prior. And again, depending on your faith in the WIAA’s RPI formula (I don’t know enough statistics to pass judgment) and MaxPreps, there’s real reason to believe the tools being used to seed the teams will be less than precise.

It’s difficult to imagine a more convoluted system to determine the best high-school basketball teams in Washington. The state’s coaches and athletic directors asked for change, and they got it, but I don’t think this is the solution they were hoping for