Not Right for Us
March 7, 2017
The proposal to utilize KPI Rankings to seed the District and Regional rounds of the MHSAA Boys and Girls Basketball Tournaments should not be adopted by the Michigan High School Athletic Association.
This is no criticism of KPI Rankings per se, or of its creator who is assistant athletic director at Michigan State University; but it’s not the right thing to do for our statewide high school basketball tournaments.
The KPI rankings is one of a half-dozen means used by the NCAA to seed its Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament. But the proposal before us is that KPI rankings become the one and only system for seeding the MHSAA’s tournaments. There would be no other criteria and no human judgment.
The result would be seeding that misses important details, like which teams are hot and which are not at season end, and which teams have recently lost players to injuries or ineligibilities and which have had players return.
KPI ranks teams on a game-by-game basis by assigning a value to every game played. A loss to an opponent with a poor record is considered a “bad loss” and has a negative point value. A win over an opponent with a good record is considered a “good win” and earns a positive point value. Margin of victory is a factor.
This is a nice tool for the NCAA to use, along with a variety of other tools and considerations that its billion-dollar budget can accommodate, but none of which is proposed for seeding the MHSAA tournaments. KPI Rankings is not sufficient as the one-and-only seeding criterion for MHSAA tournaments.
Moreover, dependence on a seeding system owned by a single individual, who is outside the MHSAA office, and who has the potential to move from MSU to anywhere across the USA, is a poor business strategy.
If there is to be seeding, there are more appropriate ways to do it for the high school level. But first there needs to be clearer consensus that seeding is a good thing to do, philosophically and practically. In the MHSAA we do this sport by sport, and level by level. And the jury is still out for seeding in Michigan high school basketball.
A Different League
December 30, 2016
Less than two years after The Palace of Auburn Hills completed $40 million of improvements to an already magnificent facility, there is serious talk of bulldozing The Palace to the ground after the NBA's Pistons bolt for downtown Detroit,
I once bought an IBM 360 mainframe computer for the Michigan High School Athletic Association office that was out of date within 12 months; and I felt terrible about it. But it was a modest amount and we did it with our own money. What is happening in Auburn Hills is, quite literally, in an entirely different league.
These developments may affect the MHSAA which has conducted one of its largest and most prestigious events – the Individual Wrestling Finals – at The Palace since 2002, and has a contract for this event through 2019. The tournament involves about 1,000 student-athletes each March.
I confess that it is difficult for an organization grounded in never-changing values to react well to the ever- and fast-changing landscape created by professional sports and major college football and basketball in their insatiable pursuits of revenue. We must, of course, and very carefully; but it's maddening.