Matt Larsen is the athletic director at North Dakota State, a position that he has held since October of 2014. He is also the chairperson and longest-tenured active member of the Division I Softball Committee; that’s the group charged with selecting and seeding every team in the 64-team NCAA tournament.
Following Sunday night’s selection show, Larsen sat down with JWOS for a 1-on-1 conversation by phone. While we didn’t get into every possible topic, we did discuss some teams individually as well as some of the bigger questions that arose as the tournament bracket was revealed.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
JWOS: Let’s get right into it. For starters, what was the straw that broke the camel’s back – in a positive way – to put Oklahoma at #1 overall and UCLA at #2?
Matt Larsen: You know, like I said on the show, you’re talking two really, really good teams. I think far and away the best two teams in the country all year, and had played consistently all year. So at that point, you really are looking at every single data point. And at the end of the day, I think the thing that kind of pushed Oklahoma over the top was they had a few more top 10 wins. And that’s the level of detail you’re getting down to, when you’re talking about two of the best teams in the country and a few more top 10 wins. And then I think when you just look at how explosive they have been all year, whether it’s against conference opponents, non conference opponents; just are really a great offensive team. And so again, that gave them a slight nod. And that’s not to slight UCLA; they’re an incredibly, incredibly talented team. But just when you’re splitting hairs, the committee just thought that Oklahoma had a little bit better resume at the end of the day.
JWOS: Fair to say that it was down to either being Oklahoma or UCLA for the #1 seed? Just between those two?
Matt Larsen: Yeah, I do; I think that, in the conversations that we had, the committee saw both of them a little step above the next group. The challenge every year, though, because of the strength of the sport of softball, your top 16 or 20 teams, there’s not a lot of differentiating between one another and you really have to dig into the information. But I think we saw those two just kind-of standing above, and we’ll see how it plays out in the tournament now.
JWOS: Let’s talk about the Big 10. As a general question, how did the committee view the Big Ten as a whole and their conference-only approach this season?
Matt Larsen: I think collectively as a committee, we tried to make sure that, you know, those are things that were out of those teams’ control, and so trying to give them, based on what they were able to do, what schedule they were able to put together, if they did well on that schedule, then we wanted to give an opportunity to get into the bracket. And certainly the Big 10, one of the things that we did, as a committee, is that we had access to the Big 10 Network, and we watched a ton of Big 10 softball games, because we didn’t have some of the typical comparison points of non-conference strength of schedule or non-conference head-to-head or some of those things, so [we]really wanted to watch as many of those games as we could to really get a personal perspective of just the strengths and weaknesses of those teams. And so certainly different than in years past, but we feel as if the three that got in, I think, really took advantage of the opportunities that they had within the league and played really well and and won the majority of their league matchups, and we just saw that those three did what they needed to do to make their way into the bracket.
JWOS: Even in a normal year, RPI isn’t the only metric that the committee looks at in evaluating teams. This year, that was even more of a challenge, because you had RPI differences due to conference-only and limited non-conference schedules. What metrics, including or excepting RPI, did the committee rely on most heavily in filling and seeding this tournament?
Matt Larsen: You’re right. I mean, in most years, the RPI is certainly a guide. But there are so many other pieces for us to dig into. In my three years, we spent a lot of time in the committee room over the course of the last two and a half days, making sure we were giving each team their due justice in terms of really evaluating their resume. And some of the things that we talk about a lot are their total body of work – and that sounds cliché, but again, a lot of pieces add up to a good resume. And so obviously, overall win loss record; head-to- head results, whether that’s against conference opponents or non-conference opponents; how’d you fare against common opponents; record against teams in the tournament. Those are some of the better teams in the country, and how did you fare when you had an opportunity to play against them? Even though some conferences were unable to play non-conference, you didn’t want to necessarily punish teams that had an opportunity to go out, and especially some of your mid-major programs who went out and build a really tough schedule and then had some success there. So strength of schedule, overall non-conference, good wins and bad losses. There are always things when you’re splitting hairs against two teams that have a very similar resume, you know, who has better quality wins potentially? Are there any bad losses on their team sheet, that third and fourth quadrant, mostly the fourth quadrant? You know, there are there some losses there that maybe the other team doesn’t have. And then we look at what teams are trending. Duke is a great example. Duke finished the season 14-1 and won the ACC tournament; they were playing really, really well. When you go back two weeks ago and we had to pre-determine sites, they were part of that conversation for the top 20. And they just fell outside of that, and to their credit, they played really, really well to finish off the season. So those are some of the things we dig into, in addition to, obviously, a lot of other criteria. But that’s kind of a snapshot of some of the things that we look at.
JWOS: South Carolina, the one SEC team not in – how did the committee view South Carolina?
Matt Larsen: I think that, for us, a couple of things had us keeping them out of the bracket. For one, their conference record. Granted, they play in a very, very strong conference in the SEC. But their overall conference record in the SEC was not very strong. And then with a 26-win season, 18 of the 26 wins came out of the fourth quadrant. So in terms of strength of schedule and intent to schedule, [we]just didn’t feel as if the wins they had or the quality of the wins they had stacked up against some other teams in the field.
JWOS: I want to ask you about Clemson, a two-part question. One, how did the committee view Clemson as a whole and two, what went into the decision to put Clemson at Alabama? When they weren’t going to host, for that to be their regional?
Matt Larsen: When you look back two weeks ago, we’re taking a snapshot at that time of who were the better 20 teams in the country. Again, this is unique this year, having to try to predetermine some sites. And I think at that time, you know, the committee viewed Clemson as one of those top 20. But when you get into the room now, and you start to compare quality of resume, and again, when you’re looking at the top 16-20, there are some really good softball teams here. And so you’re really digging into a lot of criteria; I think sometimes it’s easy for some people to say, hey, let’s look at this one data point. But again, with teams, this good and this close, you really need to look at multiple [data points], you know, and at the end of the day, Clemson had five top 50 wins. In comparison to the rest of the field in terms of seeded teams, there were teams that played 19, 18, 22, 31, 13, 20, and I can go on and on. So I think at the end of the day, I think that’s where they ended up falling out just outside of that top 16.
JWOS: What about the decision for them to go to Bama? Anything special there?
Matt Larsen: You mean Clemson going there? This is where certain bracketing principles come in. When you have sixteen teams, certain teams can’t play each other, they can’t play a conference [opponent], they can’t be in the same region with another conference opponent, and some of the things are dictated by that. Now, I will say what we did was we actually went back through and tried to look at where teams enter the bracket, so to speak, so that way we can make sure we’re balancing out as best we can, in terms of RPIs and region. And I would say for the most part, outside of some bracketing principles, from an RPI perspective, all 16 results were relatively balanced, but also again, that’s looking at do the 2s match up, do the 3s match up, and it felt pretty good at the end of the day that there was some consistency and equity there [in the bracket].
JWOS: This is one that I know a lot of people are going to be looking for when they read this interview, and that’s the PAC-12. You’ve got UCLA at #2, but that’s the only top-8 seed for the PAC-12. Washington, obviously, then goes to #16 and Oregon doesn’t host. Tell me first how the committee saw the PAC-12 as a whole.
Matt Larsen: I think year-in and year-out, the PAC-12 is really, really talented from top to bottom. This year was no different. I think this year, again, given some of the metrics that we look at, when you’re trying to differentiate between 16 or 20 really, really good teams, you start to pull out different pieces. And again, I go back to when you’re looking at top 50 wins, which is something that we spend a lot of time on, your good quality wins. Some of the PAC-12 schools, you know, didn’t have that same quality resume as some of the other schools. That’s not to say that they didn’t put together a good body of work; they did. The other piece to look at, a couple of those programs had some losses in that third and fourth quadrant, whereas some of the other schools had some really clean sheets on the back end of their schedule and their resume. And you take some of those, a few of those pieces and you weigh all those categories, those criteria that we talked about before, and you’re putting them head to head? And essentially, that’s what we do: we take all 16 of these and put them all head to head against each other, looking at all this different criteria, you know, and that’s where the teams fell out in the rankings.
JWOS: You say ‘fourth quadrant’; can you define that for me? I know, for instance, that Washington played a lot of teams in the 200s in RPI. Is that a similar definition to fourth quadrant in how you guys define that?
Matt Larsen: Basically, it’s teams in the RPI over 100. That’s a lot of times what drives your strength of schedule. When you talk about Washington specifically, the majority of Washington’s non-conference [schedule]was within that fourth quadrant. As you mentioned, there was a majority that were at 200 RPI and above. That impacts your non-conference schedule, clearly. We tried to, in knowing this was an atypical year, that there were some schools who lost games and may have had to backfill with others, we certainly understood that. I think everybody was in that boat. But again, when you’re trying to differentiate between 16 of the best teams in the country, that’s just another data point that’s important in our decision making.
JWOS: On the top 8 in the seeding, you had five SEC teams in the top eight. Was that something that the committee was – well, I won’t say ‘conscious of’, because of course you were – but was five SEC teams in the top eight something that factored into the ultimate decision making, or was that ‘just how it fell’?
Matt Larsen: It’s kinda that’s how it fell. I can say this, this is my fourth year on the committee, third year in the selection room because of last year being canceled, and we try our best when we’re looking at two teams, we almost take the name off of there so that you’re really evaluating them on their merits alone, regardless of conference, regardless of how they did last year, any of those things. You really want to take them on face value, and really, until you get to the very end and you’ve seeded 16, then we go back and start to take a look at [who the teams are]. Our job isn’t to make it fair and balanced; our job is to pick the best 16 teams that have earned the opportunity to host a regional. That’s the way we go through it. We take all of those 20, in this case, and put them up against each other head-to-head and take the name away and just pick the best resume. And that’s how we ended up filling out the top 16.
JWOS: I want to ask you about Texas and Oregon. I know from the media standpoint, we all love Texas and Oregon being in the same regional. Is that something that ever enters the conversation or even your mind when you place those two teams together?
Matt Larsen: You know, it’s really part of taking the names off the team sheets. There are some bracketing principles that go into how any championship ends up seeding a bracket or ends up populating the bracket. Our job is to make sure we’re balancing out RPI and we’re making sure that we’re balancing out that there’s 2-seeds that match up with 1-seeds a little bit. The 1-seed has earned the right to be the 1-seed, so we make sure that 2s and 3s and 4s make sense within a region. We really don’t get into any of the other dynamics that go into it. And honestly, after watching the show [on Sunday night], I know there’s an element of that to it, but that’s not something that we use in the process. We go into the process trying to build the bracket based on our principles and based on our criteria.
JWOS: Let’s talk about Duke, the one team that earned a 1-seed but isn’t at home. Can you tell me about how that came about? You’ve been quoted that you all wanted it to be as normal of a year as possible, in an atypical year, but can you tell me about that process of Duke hosting at Georgia?
Matt Larsen: Absolutely. So, two weeks ago, our task was to predetermine 20 reigonal host sites. That’s similar to all of the other spring championships – baseball, FCS football all did the same. And the reason was to be able to pre-certify all of the regional sites for COVID testing, all the protocols and to be able to work with those and to make sure that all the things that needed to be in place were in place. At that time, Duke was very much in the conversation. You know, in terms of as you evaluate the top 30 teams and try to whittle that down to 20, Duke was right there, given the resume while they were playing in the ACC and their non-conference schedule. But they fell just outside of that top 20. And then, as I said on ]Sunday night’s selection show], to their credit, they finished the season as probably one of the strongest teams in the country. 14-1, won the ACC tournament, and legitimately deserved to be listed as a top-16 seed. So we didn’t want to punish them because two weeks ago they were ranked outside of that; we wanted to give them that number one seed. Unfortunately, because of that kind of unique situation this year, we had to send them on the road.
JWOS: Was it always part of the plan that if a hosting team was not the seeded team, that the hosting team would still be in that same regional?
Matt Larsen: I think that was always tha plan. Not a perfect situation by any circumstances, but again, trying to make the best of a situation that we’ve been in this year. And at the end of the day, I think 19 of the 20 – or pretty close to that – held true. And unfortunately, Duke was the outlier there.
JWOS: You mentioned about the amount of time to get to this point; can you put that on a scale for me? What kind of time did you guys spend, especially this week, in the committee room and going over metrics and teams, etc?
Matt Larsen: We started at 5:00 on Friday, and probably didn’t wrap up until close to midnight. Then Saturday, we went from about 8:30 to a little past midnight. And then were in there [Sunday morning]. I give a lot of credit to our committee. I think our committee worked really hard in trying to build the best bracket in a really uncommon year. And I give them credit. You know, I think the time and energy that they put in and the debates, the conversations and discussions were really, really healthy with, again, trying to make sure we’re rewarding the best 64 teams and the most deserving 64 teams.
JWOS: You and I did an interview a few years ago, and I remember one of our topics then was on the time spent watching games during the season. Was your process there able to stay pretty similar this year, even with all of the COVID complications across the board, or did it change at all for you?
Matt Larsen: This was something that we spoke about as a committee, and even on our regional advisory committees, because even coaches on the regional advisory committees weren’t seeing some teams in person that they typically had. So we really challenged both the committee and the regional advisory committees to watch as many games as they could this year, trying to get some firsthand perspective on teams. Knowing that when we got into the room, there were some other metrics that maybe we wouldn’t have a comparison point for. And so trying to make sure that we had as good of an idea of where each program was. And I would say this year, probably more than any other, I watched a lot more games, through conference streaming, through ESPN and a lot of different coverages. There’s a lot of games that are televised. So the opportunity for us to watch games was there. And I think more than any year, I think our committee took advantage of that opportunity.
JWOS: As you sit here, are you comfortable that the committee got the best 64 teams in the field?
Matt Larsen: I do. I think we did. When you look at all the time and energy we went through to look at all the deserving teams to be under consideration, I think we do. I think it’s a good bracket. There’s 64 teams that have played some really good softball this year, and excited to watch them compete.
