Automatic Automatics

When the NCAA selection committee sits down in March to discuss which teams will get an invitation to the tournament, 31 teams will already know for sure that they will be in.  In theory we don't yet know which teams will be the 31 that receive automatic bids, as they are determined by the winners of the end of season conference tournaments (with the exception of the Ivy League's bid).  But in practice we can kind of pencil in some of them because they are the teams that seem to dominate the automatic bid year after year (looking at you, Marist and South Dakota State).

Which teams are the most automatic when it comes to automatic bids? I decided to look into the last twelve years of tournament bids to see which teams keep coming back year after year.  I decided (sort of arbitrarily) that a team couldn't be considered dominant unless they won the automatic bid at least half the time over the last few years.  How many years? I didn't know the answer to that. So I looked to see if there was a team in each conference that got the automatic bid at least half the time over the last three years, then over the last four years, then over the last five years, etc. up to twelve years.  Then I counted up the number of times I recorded a teams name (maximum ten) and made a ranked list.  Ties were broken by which team had the longest active streak of getting the automatic bid, then by most recent automatic bid, and then by existence of other dominant teams in the same conference.

(For instance, Arkansas Little Rock, automatic bid recipient from the Sun Belt Conference for the past two years, has therefore won the automatic bid at least half the time in the last three years and four years, for a score of 2. But Middle Tennessee State, automatic bid recipient in 2010, 2009, 2007, 2006, 2005 and 2004, has won the automatic bid in the Sun Belt at least half the time in the last four years, the last six years (3/6), the last seven years (4/7), the last eight years (5/8), the last nine years (6/9), the last ten years (6/10), the last eleven years (6/11) and the last twelve years (6/12), for a score of 8.  Meanwhile, McNeese State has won the automatic bid in the Southland Conference for the last two years as well, but no other team from the Southland Conference has received the automatic bid at least half the time over any of the time scales I looked at.  While both UA Little Rock and McNeese State have an Automatic Automatic score of 2, I would argue that McNeese State would be slightly more likely, based only on past seasons performance and not on anything in this current season, to get an automatic bid than Little Rock because Little Rock faces stiffer competition from another dominant team while McNeese State does not.  Therefore I placed McNeese State higher on the list than Little Rock.)

Anyways, here's the list:

AUTOMATIC AUTOMATICS
Rank. Score - Team - Conference - comment
1. 10 - Stanford - Pac 12 - each year since 2003
2. 10 - Marist - MAAC - each year since 2006
3. 10 - Connecticut - Big East - each year since 2008
4. 10 - UW Green Bay - Horizon League
5. 10 - Liberty - Big South
6. 8 - Tennessee - SEC
7. 8 - UC Santa Barbara - Big West
8. 8 - Middle Tennessee St. - Sun Belt
9. 7 - Bowling Green - MAC
10. 7 - Chattanooga - Southern Conference
11. 6 - South Dakota State - Summit League
12. 6 - Fresno State - WAC
13. 6 - Prairie View A&M - SWAC
14. 6 - Gonzaga - West Coast Conference
15. 6 - Ohio State - Big Ten
16. 6 - Xavier - Atlantic 10
17. 6 - Montana - Big Sky
18. 5 - Hampton - MEAC
19. 5 - Baylor - Big 12
20. 5 - St. Francis (PA) - NEC
21. 5 - Old Dominion - Colonial
22. 4 - Princeton - Ivy League
23. 3 - Duke - ACC
24. 3 - East Tennessee St. - Atlantic Sun
25. 2 - McNeese St. - Southland
26. 2 - Navy - Patriot
27. 2 - UT Martin - Ohio Valley
28. 2 - Samford - Southern
29. 2 - UA Little Rock - Sun Belt
30. 2 - San Diego State - Mountain West
31. 2 - Purdue - Big Ten
32. 2 - Northern Iowa - Missouri Valley
33. 2 - James Madison - Colonial
34. 2 - Austin Peay - Ohio Valley
35. 1 - Maryland - ACC
36. 1 - Sacred Heart - NEC
37. 1 - Utah - Mountain West
38. 1 - Central Florida - Conference USA
39. 1 - Hartford - America East
40. 1 - Vermont - America East
41. 1 - Lehigh - Patriot
42. 1 - North Carolina - ACC
43. 1 - New Mexico - Mountain West

There are a number of problems with this list, as there would be for any list like this.  There are some teams that have changed conferences recently and would now have a 0% chance at getting that conference's automatic bid (Fresno State in the WAC, Utah in the Mountain West). This list also gives the short shrift to the very recently dominant, like Delaware and Florida Gulf Coast. 

What was interesting to me in researching this was that every single conference has had a repeat winner over the last four years, even in the evenly matched conferences like the Missouri Valley and Conference USA.  If the winner of a conference was determined completely by chance, you'd get a repeat winner over four years only about half the time (assuming a ten member conference), not 31 out of 31 times. Only five of the 31 conferences had three different winners over the last three years, something that would happen 72% of the time if it was done randomly. 





Now in:
Eastern Illinois

Now out:
Eastern Kentucky

Conferences with multiple bids:
Big 12: 7
Big 10: 7
Big East: 6
SEC: 6
ACC: 5
Pac 12: 4
Atlantic 10: 3
Missouri Valley: 2
West Coast: 2