How much do we know about the NCAA tournament field already?

My old friend Mike McMahon made an interesting observation the other day: as of Nov. 11 last season, 11 of the teams in the top 15 in the Pairwise ended up making the NCAA tournament.

The Pairwise, which is used by the NCAA selection committee to evaluate which teams do and don't make the national tournament based on their record and quality of competition, is an ever-evolving creature. From one year to the next, different criteria are applied; in the past, it has included calculations for teams' records in their most recent games, their road record, and more. Even from last season to this one, there have been tweaks made to better account for outcomes in overtime (I talked here about how one team was effectively gaming the system, and those holes got filled in by the committee over the summe