Well, it’s all over but the games. It’s always strangely satisfying to get to this point in the college basketball season. After poring over a ridiculous number of games, reading a mindless amount of statistics, and engaging in endless debates with fellow bracketologists, the announcement of the field provides a sense of closure. In past years, it’s been a somewhat hollow sense of closure, because the committee has made a lot of bizarre decisions that don’t appear to have any grounding in the rules and procedures that they themselves have stipulated.

This year, though? I have to say that the committee did a pretty good job. Yes, there are a couple of areas that I have some questions about, but compared to things that have happened in the past 5-6 brackets, I don’t see much cause for complaint.

Overall, things were pretty cut-and-dried. The committee obviously valued good wins and good late-season play over more stable (and milquetoast) resumes, as witnessed by Oregon and Kentucky getting in instead of Illinois State and Mississippi. The seeding was consistent, by and large. As mentioned earlier, the official TMC bracket picked 33 of the 34 at-large teams, and 55 of 65 teams within one seed of where they actually ended up. Those are better numbers than we had on Netwire last year, but still somewhat surprising, given the different ways that each committee seems to approach the tournament.

Some specific musings, after the jump.

Let’s start off with some topics of focus:

BIGGEST SURPRISE (inclusion division): There actually weren’t a lot of surprises here.  I was a bit surprised that Ohio State, with its athletic director on the committee, didn’t get a slot in the field. Yes, we’re always told that team and/or conference affiliation doesn’t matter, but past experience (ahem…Virginia last year…) has shown otherwise. I’m of the belief that Ohio State actually DID have a slot in the field, but when Georgia beat Arkansas for the SEC title, the Buckeyes’ at-large slot disappeared. I think Oregon probably belonged in the field — they were my first team out, and had been in nearly all of the bracket projections up until Sunday afternoon.

BIGGEST SURPRISE (seeding division): While I agree that Oregon belonged in the field, their placement as a 9 seed seems a bit much. After all, this was a team with a profile similar to Kentucky, who played very uneven basketball down the stretch, and whose ticket into the tournament field was apparently stamped due to a sweep at home of the Arizona schools in the last week of the season. It’s hard to believe that a team with that profile is deserving of a 9 seed, particularly when compared to the other teams in the 9-10 range.

MOST DISTURBING TREND: As we’ve seen in recent years, there’s far too much emphasis placed on the BCS conference teams’ performances in their conference tournaments. The most egregious example of this was two years ago, when Syracuse went from being a borderline bubble team to somehow getting a 5 seed (and eventually losing in the first round to Texas A&M). This year, the pattern held true — Clemson rose from the 6-7 range to getting a semi-protected 5 seed, and Pittsburgh went from a projected 8 seed all the way up to a 4. Granted, Pittsburgh is a good team, and could very well run right through the top half of the South Region, but I still think that their seeding isn’t representative of their entire body of work.

BIGGEST FAKE CONTROVERSY: A lot of bracketologists were complaining about how Tennessee, who was probably a 1 seed until Saturday afternoon’s loss, got stuck in the same region as the overall #1 seed (North Carolina). I think this is much ado about nothing, mostly because of a false premise regarding the seeding of teams. It’s important to remember that teams in the top 4 seed lines are seeded based upon the most favorable geographical regions available. Based on that, Tennessee was going to be seeded in the region that offered them the closest geographical location — in this case, Charlotte, NC, which is closer to Knoxville than Detroit or Houston.

TOUGHEST REGION: Most commentators had anointed the East region as the toughest, but I’d lean more towards the Midwest. Kansas is probably playing the best basketball of all the 1 seeds right now, yet they have a potential Sweet 16 matchup with Clemson, who really has raised their level of play in the past month. On the opposite side of the bracket, you’ve got the Big East and Big Ten regular season champs, a suddenly healthy (and dangerous) USC team, a Kansas State team with the real player of the year, and the most evenly-matched 7-10 game in the field (Gonzaga-Davidson).

EASIEST PATH TO THE ELITE 8: Duke. By far. Whoever set this path up for the Blue Devils is obviously on the take. Neither West Virginia nor Arizona is going to be able to mount much of a challenge against Duke. Meanwhile, Purdue is not really built for tournament success (mostly due to youth), and while Xavier is a fine team, they may be the most ill-suited squad to take advantage of Duke’s inadequacies in the paint. The smart money here is on Duke to cruise to the Regional Final…although they may be ill-prepared to deal with what UCLA brings to the table, provided the Bruins get that far.

We’ll have more insights throughout the week, including podcasts breaking down each of the four regions, appearing on Tuesday night.