Selection Committee Chairman Dan Guerrero.

Yes, it’s time to bitch about the seedings. It’s an annual rite of passage, and before any of you roll your eyes, the public has just as much of a right to chastise the committee when it does wrong for as frequently as it does right. And it often does right. More times than not.

But not this year. Where do I begin? One by one, I’m going to roast the committee, because although it picked the 65 right teams (woo hoo! First time ever I went 65 for 65) it really fouled up on where to put all those clubs. Dan Guerrero, the chairman whose job is the envy of everyone except ON Selection Sunday, had a teleconference last night with the media. If you’d like to see any of what he had to say, click here.

This was a lazily-put-together bracket. There are some gross mis-seedings and general breaking-the-rules procedures that happened. For as much as I love the bracket, so pristine and so pure, I hate when it’s tainted by the judgments of men who overthought themselves through the process and gave us a final product that fails to live up to what it could have been. You’ll never please everybody, but when the chorus is this loud, you know it’s been a bad year. I write this just hours after the Selection Show; I can’t wait to see what columns, blog posts and commentary awaits tomorrow when people have had a night’s sleep to build up their stamina and talk about these brackets. So here’s my initial take.

Duke getting the third No. 1 seed over Syracuse is what’s getting the most play right now, and rightly so. Hell, it was becoming all but accepted that Duke would move to the 2 line and West Virginia would take over after winning so dramatically in the Big East tournament. Some subterfuge by Syracuse at play, and the committee doesn’t by the balk with it. Is Arinze Onuaku’s injury the reason why? If so, good for the committee on calling Cuse’s bluff, but I still don’t see how Duke’s profile beats out SU’s.

So then you’ve got the Ohio State fans, who are certainly not happy with getting slotted in Kansas’ bracket, which would mean OSU was the weakest No. 2. That’s certainly not the case, right?A team that won all but one game since Jan. 27 couldn’t possibly be considered on the same plane as another No. 2, Villanova, which has lost six of its last 10 games and has three fewer total losses on the season. Yet Villanova finds itself in Duke’s region. Villanova? Streaking and skidding down the stretch worse than anyone outside of Wake Forest and Texas (and how appropriate those two grease fires get to play each other).

And Gonzaga? An 8? It’s been a lower seed than the public expected many times before, but nothing like this. And it gets a Florida State team, which, frankly, is also mis-seeded. You want to know why Gonzaga got the shaft? Because it only has two wins over teams in the field: Wisconsin and Saint Mary’s. That seemed to be a real point of emphasis this season. How did you do against other teams that made The Tournament. Gonzaga is much better than an 8, and it deserved something more than facing Syracuse in the second round.

Vanderbilt as a 4. What a joke. Ho-ho! I’m startin’ feel like Costanza! George is gettin’ upset!

And have yet gotten an explanation on how the committee goofed on its no-conference-teams-can-play-each-other-until-the-Elite-Eight rule? Because Marquette and West Virginia (who’ve had a lot of good games) are on a collision course for the Sweet 16. Can Andy Katz or someone get an explanation to how and why this happened? This is a sloppy error, a rookie mistake. Things like this bug the maniacs like me because we take the selections seriously. You send a message of poor oversight and sloppiness by committing such a mistake.

BYU was one of the biggest goof-ups in seed placement this year. (AP)

Back to seeding. Tennessee’s skid gave it a 6, but it did beat UK and Kansas, remember. Are they unfairly positioned? See how many questions I’m having to ask? More questions from people means a bad job by the committee. No other team in the field has wins over two 1-seeds. And with a top-15 RPI, you know Guerrero stood by his word when he said RPI was not a huge factor this year. Not terribly upset about UT’s placement, but Vols fans who had banked on a 5 at worst aren’t taking the news well.

Vanderbilt as a 4. What a joke. Ho-ho! I’m startin’ feel like Costanza! George is gettin’ upset!

BYU-Florida is the mis-seeded special in my eyes. BYU could’ve gotten a 5 and no one would’ve complained. But a 7? Sigh. The team is a 7 on KenPom’s rankings. Guess that 14-4 road/neutral mark just wasn’t good enough. And Florida, which I thought would make it, is laps ahead of the other at-large stragglers with a 10? Wow. More and more, this thing looks hastily put together. What I’m understanding is that even if Chandler Parsons’ 65-foot 3 doesn’t fall in the North Carolina State game Florida is still in. Mind-boggling.

And those who don’t agree with me on BYU-Florida surely will about California-Louisville. That’s an 8/9? Because it feels like it should be an 11/12. Shame on me for entertaining the thought that Louisville would miss the cut. Like Lloyd Christmas, I was way off. Winning the Pac-10 meant more to the committee than we could have ever known. Louisville’s profile is fairly hideous, so I can’t perceive how it gets a 9 with two wins over Syracuse yet Tennessee is practically punished and gets a 6.

Temple-Cornell just isn’t fair. I’m going to make that an entirely different post. Way too many non-Big-Six-conference teams pitted against each other in the first round. I think Temple at a 5 is the third-most disgusting mis-seeding, right behind Louisville and BYU.

Man, Notre Dame play well enough to get to a 6-seed? How badly did the committee fall for that Big East tournament? Yet, WVU got gypped.

New Mexico State is a 12? Huh? Now I’m a confused child just wandering the halls of a grocery story.

Houston, becoming a chic upset pick (can’t blame that logic) is still a 14 at heart, not a 13, but I’m beginning to nit-pick.

That’s what I see, and I haven’t even gotten into the geography arguments. We’ll save that for another time.

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