Word: head-to-head
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Sorry Brown, but the NCAA doesn't care one bit that you won more of your games down the stretch and that you beat Harvard head-to-head and in the Ivy standings. The NCAA has to be objective, cold, and insensitive--it can't take any dramatics into account...
First off, notice that the NCAA does not rank teams like the NFL tie-breaking system. The NFL teaches us that team rankings should be determined by record, then head-to-head contests, then league records, records vs. common opponents, and then strength of the schedule. The NCAA approaches a similar list of criteria in a wholly different manner...
Another common misperception is that the NCAA actually takes the time to do a pair-wise comparison of every team using human observation, matching their relative performances head-to-head, and arranging the teams in such a way as to reduce the number of contradictions between the rankings and the head-to-head results...
...this does not happen, I'll leave an exercise to the reader. Find the online schedules of Hartford, Connecticut, Dartmouth, Boston College, Boston University, Brown, Princeton and Harvard. Now try to rank these teams fairly based solely on head-to-head results. Are you confused yet? Mission accomplished...
...other comparisons--record against common opponents and head-to-head results--only matter when distinguishing between teams with relatively close results on the index...