Do We Want Really Want a "Meritocracy"?
No
It’s College Basketball Week here at Undrafted! In honor of March Madness, we’re doing a week of all college basketball content, with a new post dropping (hopefully) every day. Starting today with a look at what we can learn from the closest thing to perfect we have in sports…
No matter how many eulogies are written for college basketball’s cultural impact — and it does seem like every year people suggest that college basketball, or at least men’s college basketball, is dead — come March, people still turn their attention to the NCAA Tournaments. Whether it was the Saint Peter’s story last year, or the Jalen Suggs buzzer-beater in 2021, or Zion-mania in 2019, the sport always manages to take center stage come March, because March Madness is just about the most perfect thing in sports.
Which is a little strange, because as a system for determining the best basketball team in the country, it’s not very good. Does anyone think Saint Peter’s was one of the eight best teams last year? Or that UCLA was one of the four best in 2021? Or that Connecticut was the best team in 2014? Even last year’s Kansas team, which was by no means a fluke champion, was never ranked #1 in the country and didn’t win the Big 12 regular season title outright. Sure, every playoff system has its upsets, but in no other are they as frequent as in college basketball. And nobody seems to mind…
In fact, these things are obviously related. That is, March Madness is not popular in spite of all the chaos, but BECAUSE of it. I suspect there is a lesson here. Other playoff systems try to approximate some spirit of fairness, and they only end up pissing people off. The NBA playoffs are too long, the MLB playoffs are too random (not really, but that’s what everyone’s always whining about), the NFL playoffs are determined by too many byzantine tie-breaker formulas, etc. Meanwhile, college basketball just gathers a bunch of teams and plays ~140 games over three weeks, and everyone loves it.
The lesson of this, I think, is that even though everyone SAYS they want a meritocracy, the actual revealed preferences of most people are very different. When people talk about fairness, they don’t really want elaborate systems meant to determine what everyone “deserves.” They want something like what March Madness provides.
For one, it’s actually good to be overly inclusive, even if it means applying different standards. The beauty of the NCAA Tournament is that it includes schools like Kennesaw State and Colgate and Furman — but these teams only make it by winning conferences where the level of competition is lower than in the major conferences. These schools don’t, strictly speaking, “deserve” their bids as much as schools like Arizona and Alabama and Texas, who won more competitive conferences. But those schools add something crucial to the Tournament that couldn’t be replicated if you craved “merit” above all else.
Of course, if teams could ONLY make the Tournament by winning their conference, that would also be a problem. That would mean a team like Oral Roberts had an easier path than UCLA, making the unfairness unacceptable. Indeed, that was how the Tournament worked prior to 1975, and the fact that some of the best teams in the country invariably lost their conference championships is why March Madness’ popularity didn’t explode until after it expanded to include dozens of at-large bids as well. This ensured that the system was forgiving of teams that played in tough conferences.
Such a double standard is ok, even desirable, because the two paths to an NCAA Tournament bid are transparent and consistent every season. Everyone knew, for example, that North Carolina could win a bid if they won last week’s ACC tournament; on the other hand, it was also pretty clear that they hadn’t done enough to earn an at-large bid if they didn’t win the tournament. This kind of clarity is good: It would have been a bummer if a team with as much talent as North Carolina had NO chance, but had the Selection Committee simply let them in, it would have looked like they were pulling strings for a big name.
Of course, Selection Sunday is never completely without controversy. There are always debates about snubs and dubious inclusions. But because of the over-inclusivity I already mentioned, these debates happen pretty far from the most “deserving” teams. For example, yesterday’s decision to leave out Rutgers was indeed questionable. You could make a strong argument for Rutgers over teams like Providence or Nevada. But Rutgers were 19-14 this season and finished 10th in the Big Ten. It’s not like they didn’t have their shots to play their way in, or like they would have been a serious threat to win the dance.
Which brings us the final thing that makes the Tournament work: Even though the tournament is chaotic, it is not PURE chaos. Usually, one of the best teams wins. In 33 of the 37 tournaments since the brackets expanded in 1985, the winner was seeded 1, 2, or 3. The winner has only come from a lower seed once since 1998 (2014 UConn). So with all the upsets and excitement, you almost always get a “deserving” champion.
So what can we conclude about fairness from the Tournament?
First, it is better to be overly inclusive, and to invite too many teams, even teams that have no chance of winning it all, and even if that means lowering standards for some teams. This is counterintuitive; we usually think of exacting standards as the way to figure out who “deserves” what.
Second, you want a variety of selection methods. The key to the Tournament’s success is the inclusion of automatic AND at-large bids. Rather than trying to find one perfect system for determining merit, offering multiple systems prevents any one system from being too exclusive of a particular kind of team.
Third, you want to have clear and consistent rules for selection. I’ve written many times about the importance of rules, but I think the Tournament shows how the first two points, about inclusivity and variability, interact with rules to be forgiving while also being consistently enforced. Often, we think that consistently applied rules have to be harsh, and that’s not the case.
Finally, the tournament shows that what matters is the outcome. That is, we know the Tournament works because it is A) fun, and B) produces legitimate champions. If either weren’t the case, then we could realize that, however we determine fairness, we’re going about it wrong. The College Football Playoff seemingly tries to incorporate a lot of the principles here… but the CFP sucks, so it’s obviously doing something wrong.
This is an important point: There is nothing wrong with looking at the results of a system and concluding the system itself must be broken! So often people think that “fairness” means designing rules and standards in a black box and then letting things play out however those rules dictate. To change those rules is to lower our standards or pull strings or otherwise violate principles of fairness. But this is nonsense! If something is broken, then fix it!
If your system for hiring coaches keeps excluding Black people, then change it. If your banking system keeps requiring bailouts for banks, then change it. These screwed up rewards are not the results of people getting what they “deserve”; they are signs that the system for determining what people deserve is broken.