INDIANAPOLIS (NBC 26) — The UW-Green Bay men's basketball team currently stands ninth in the Horizon League. But if the regular season ended now, the Phoenix would be the No. 7 seed in the conference tournament - hosting their first-round playoff game.
That's because the conference is using an unconventional formula to determine its seeding this year. The Horizon League's assistant commissioner, UWGB alumnus Cam Fuller, compared it to the NCAA's RPI ratings and said the conference's membership felt this was the most fair waY to seed teams in a year when not everyone will play the same amount of games.
"Our membership felt like that's really the best way to seed the tournament knowing that simply going off of wins and losses this year really wouldn't allow us to seed the tournament appropriately," Fuller said Monday in an interview with NBC 26.
"The more our athletic directors and our coaches talked the more it seemed like this was going to be the way to keep an unperfect year a little closer to a perfect scenario," he added.
According to the Horizon League's website, the system was created "due to the unbalanced nature of the Horizon League schedule because of COVID-19. It uses league winning percentage, strength of schedule and number of league games played as its primary factors; it also gives more credit to road wins than home wins.
Fuller said the formula has garnered mixed reaction from fans.
"Like anything, there's always going to be people that wonder as it relates to how their team shook out," he said. "But I think it's really given strength to those schools that have played games and to those schools that win."
The Horizon League tournament will begin with its opening round on Thursday, February 25. The quarterfinals will be played Tuesday, March 2. Those rounds will be played on the campus of the higher-seeded team.
The tournament then shifts to a neutral site in Indianapolis with the semifinals on March 8 and the championships for both the men's and women's tournaments on March 9.
As is the case in other years, the winner of each tournament will receive the conference's automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament.
