At this point, the surprising thing isn’t that the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee does something appalling on an annual basis, but that each year it finds a new and different way to appall me. After the committee announced the pairings yesterday for its annual tournament (set to begin Thursday), it immediately became clear that the concepts of order and evenhandedness were not in attendance.

In most years, it’s been the committee’s insistent use of the RPI rating that’s had me feeling down. The RPI, which stands for Ratings Percentage Index, is a Rather Putrid Indicator of a team’s actual quality, and has led to some bizarre seeding decisions in the past.

This year was no exception, as it inexplicably seeded Tennessee as a no. 2 ahead of North Carolina, and gift-wrapped a no. 5 seed for Nevada based largely, if not entirely, on its RPI ranking.

If it had followed that pattern consistently, I’d at least be somewhat okay with it. No, it’s not a great way to decide how to put 64 teams into the tournament field or rank them, but if everybody knows those are the rules when the season starts, there’s at least a sense of fairness about the whole thing.

What happened instead is that the committee used the RPI – except when it wasn’t convenient, in which case it ignored it. For instance, the committee had no problem putting everybody in the RPI top 35 into the tournament – unless that team was named Missouri State or Hofstra. In those cases, the RPI was dismissed as a fluke and other criteria were found.

The Pride had an RPI ranking of 31, which was better than that of 15 teams that received at-large bids to the tournament – including one that got a no. 5 seed and two that got a no. 6. As I said on Friday, I don’t think Hofstra had any business being in the tournament, but based on the criteria the committee had established in previous seasons, it certainly should have been taken more seriously as a contender.

Hofstra’s complaint, however, pales beside that of Missouri State.The Bears entered Selection Sunday with the nation’s no. 20 RPI, and no team ranked in the top 30 had ever been denied an at-large bid. At least, until yesterday. The committee opted to leave Missouri State out entirely, even though every indicator it supposedly uses – strength of schedule, last 10 games, wins over other teams in the RPI top 50 – supported the Bears’ case.

Making this even more infuriating is that this was one of the rare cases where the RPI was right. Unlike Hofstra, the Bears actually are really, really good – probably better than the majority of the at-large bid recipients in the field. For another barometer, check out Jeff Sagarin’s college basketball ratings in USA Today.His formula, which accounts for both schedule and margin of victory, rates Missouri State as the 16th-best team in the country. For comparison’s sake, Tennessee ranked one spot behind it and got a no. 2 seed.

Two other teams were shafted nearly as badly, as Florida State (no. 22 in Sagarin’s rankings) and Cincinnati (no. 26) also didn’t get invites yesterday. At least in Florida State’s case, it probably saw it coming.The Seminoles won half their ACC games, including a win over Duke, but their RPI ranking of no. 62 sunk their hopes. Cincinnati’s case was more puzzling. The Bearcats lost to eventual Big East champ Syracuse at the buzzer in the Big East tournament, won half their games in the Big East regular season, and had a no. 40 RPI – yet somehow were excluded in favor of the likes of Seton Hall, Utah State, and Air Force.

All the television analysts are focusing on Air Force today as the team that usurped bids belonging to Missouri State or Cincinnati, and there’s some merit in that. The Falcons went 22-6 against a comically easy schedule that included only one Top 50 RPI team and lost to lowly Wyoming in the Mountain West tournament. Most projections didn’t even list them as “on the bubble” heading into yesterday’s action – they were just “out.” But the Falcons got a huge surprise when they turned on their sets last night.

However, the Air Force selection – objectionable though it was – wasn’t nearly the committee’s worst offense. The invitations awarded to Seton Hall and Utah State were far more indefensible – among the worst ever perpetrated by the NCAA, in fact.

Sorry Pirate fans, but your team doesn’t belong here. Even by the faulty logic the NCAA uses to select tournament teams, this one was a head-scratcher. The Pirates’ RPI of 58 barely rated ahead of Florida State’s and, unlike the Seminoles, Seton Hall didn’t have a single marquee win on its resume. Sagarin’s rankings had them 75th, right between Kent State and Virginia Tech, and looking at the drubbing they took from Rutgers on Wednesday night, it’s hard to dispute his conclusion.

Utah State was equally fortunate after compiling a 22-8 record against competition nearly as week as that of Air Force. The Aggies played only one good team, Nevada, and only beat them once in three tries. Somehow, that and a tie for second in a weak conference was still good enough to rank them ahead of Cincinnati, Missouri State, and the gang.

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Since I’ve just spent most of my column trashing the NCAA’s work, let’s give them credit for a few things they did get right. For starters, they correctly picked the four top seeds and rightly made Duke the top overall seed, though I have to question how a very strong Texas team ended up as the no. 2 in the Blue Devils’ region.Additionally, the committee resisted the urge to raise Gonzaga to a no. 2 seed – while the Zags played some top competition early in the season, they lost to all the big boys (Memphis, UConn, Washington) and struggled to win their confer ence tournament in a horrible league.

Overall, however, the bad severely outweighs the good this time around.In addition to the shaftings mentioned above, the seedings were all over the place. It wasn’t just the Nevada and Tennessee examples, either; for instance, weak teams like Bucknell, San Diego State, Montana, and Kent State got seeded ahead of the likes of Bradley and Xavier, while Kansas’s “reward”for winning the Big 12 tournament is a three-game slate of Bradley-Pitt-Memphis.

That won’t take any of the fun out of March Madness once the games start, of course, and it’s not like any legitimate national title aspirants were excluded from the field. But if the NCAA is going to persist in convening a committee to select and seed the tournament field, it would be nice if it would stop screwing it up so badly. Or, at the very least, be consistent about how it screws it up.

Mr. Hollinger is the author of the 2005-06 Pro Basketball Forecast.