Arizona athletic director is serving on the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Committee; he gave the Star an inside look at what the job entails, from watching games to weighing metrics to sequestering in Indianapolis.
As a first-year member of the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Committee, Heeke is now taking the second of two expense-paid trips this season to the NCAA’s hometown of Indianapolis. There, he gets to watch college basketball, talk college basketball, read analytics about college basketball … and then watch and talk some more college basketball.
Heeke’s previous two stints on the NCAA baseball committee, and Arizona’s basketball tradition, made him a natural candidate. Two previous Arizona ADs, Cedric Dempsey and Jim Livengood, also served on the committee, while another, Greg Byrne, now serves on it as Alabama’s AD.Once Heeke joined, he picked up his conference assignments and began meeting with fellow committee members and conference officials regularly via conference call.
His primary responsibilityWhat Heeke is expected to comment considerably on are the teams within the Mountain West, WAC and Sun Belt — how they’re doing within their conferences, trends, injuries and anything else that might affect their résumés. Even a league that traditionally sends only its automatic qualifier — what is informally known as an"AQ" or"one-bid" league — requires a deep look, Heeke said.
“It's very important to the 1-, 2- and 3-seeds that the 10, 11 and 12 are in the right spots,” Heeke said. “Most people will say, `Oh, they're an AQ, so just put them in at the 15.' Well, if you're the 2 you might be saying, 'That's not a 15.’" "You need to understand the game. You can't do that just on metrics. Or else we would just rank them by the number — NET, Kenpom, whatever.”
Another complication is measuring teams that naturally get a lot of Quad 1 opportunities by playing in a top-rated conference against teams in mid-major leagues that might only get a handful. “I'm checking scores every night,” Heeke says. “I'm watching games every night on all the different platforms. I'm especially focused on those six conferences that I'm engaged in, but I also want to look at the top seeds and the best teams in the country and kind of see what everything is.
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