Survey says coaches want MHSAA hoops tourney seeded; committee forms
Seventy percent of 1,200 coaches say they want Michigan's high school basketball state tournament to end random pairings
The pairings for Michigan’s boys and girls high school basketball state tournament have forever been random within each district, regular season records irrelevant.
And for decades, a segment of the population has seen that as unjust.
There is finally a drumbeat for change, with once-faint cries suddenly stirring logic into action.
The Basketball Coaches Association of Michigan, aka BCAM, is forming a 12-coach committee to address the issue after a recent survey showed 70 percent of the roughly 1,200 coaches who responded favored seeding the state tournament.
The committee — made up of six boys and six girls coaches from different regions and classes — is scheduled to meet for the first time on Sunday morning, June 12 in East Lansing.
“Our biggest concern, I think, is to see we if can reach a consensus on, first, where do you seed — is it just districts? Districts and regionals? How do we want to proceed with that?” BCAM president Tom Hursey said Thursday. “I think from the (Michigan High School Athletic Association’s) point of view, they need something that’s not going to be hours and hours and hours of computer programming and entering all these statistics to try to seed these teams. Something that’s easy to do and I’d guess you’d say open to the public.
“And once that’s done and we feel like it’s a strong enough proposal, we’ll see if it’s a viable idea with them. We find if we work together with the MHSAA and ask them for their ideas, we can solve a problem, rather than attack them and say, ‘This is what you have to do.’”
Any proposal that comes out of this committee would go to the MHSAA’s basketball committee in December. And that committee would then make the pitch to the MHSAA’s Representative Council next spring. The earliest any change could take effect would be for the 2017-18 season, Hursey said.
“The MHSAA is not against seeding,” Hursey said. “It’s how you do it.”
The playoff seeding exploratory committee is expected to be led by Muskegon boys coach Keith Guy. Williamson girls coach Pete Cool is also part of the 12-member group. Cool’s 19-1 Hornets lost to 15-5 Haslett in the first round of their Class B district in 2015, one of many examples highlighting the issue with random pairings.
“I think it’s pretty important,” Cool said. “Every year you see teams that had good seasons and their reward is the luck of the draw. I’ve been to district meetings where they literally drew names out of a hat and teams that have two or three wins get to play each other and vice versa. There’s a reason Cleveland plays Golden State (in the NBA Finals) and not in the first round.”
Cool and Hursey both said Michigan State assistant athletic director and analytics guru Kevin Pauga has been asked to be part of the process. Pauga created KPI Sports algorithms, a transparent and layered metrics system that measures teams’ resumes. The NCAA tournament selection committee uses it to help determine its 68-team field.
“I’ve been in contact with Kevin Pauga, and he’s brilliant,” Cool said. “And he has all of these algorithms to make it very easy regarding travel, teams hosting … he had it all worked out. I’m excited to see not only what happens in this meeting, but in the years to come.
“The momentum has been the strongest I’ve ever seen it.”
Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.