I usually agree with your takes, but this one is garbage. I don't think I've ever heard anyone argue that late games shouldn't count more. Fine with it not being part of this if the committee handles it well. On the blowouts, treating a 20-30 point win the same as a 10 point win is just nuts. 20 is still low, but significantly more reasonable. Not sure why we care so much about teams running up scores -- it is still going to happen, and usually happens at the beginning of the year when teams aren't thinking about getting into the tourney.
On the point difference, I'm not agreeing with 10, but I'm an analytics guy by trade. Sometimes blowouts end up being closer than they should have been, just like close games end up looking like blowouts. Common sense tells me 10 points isn't the right mix there, but I seriously doubt 20+ is either. That would eliminate a massive amount of non-competitive 15 or so point wins, leaving just the true blowouts nobody cares about anyway. My point is it's a suspiciously round number, and the kind of thing where they say "we used Google analytics as input" and then likely didn't use anything like that to determine that number. I'd guess it's something like 14-16.
As for the late wins vs early wins stuff, there are plenty of people who think that's been a mistake for a long time in college basketball. What other sport weighs regular season wins differently? Should the MLB, NBA, NFL, etc. all adopt a measure where early wins only count as half a win and late wins count double? Because Duke/UNC draws the crowds they get to play late on both halves of the schedule, we're fans of those games also being more valuable? We didn't play a ranked team in the last 7 games of our season last year. Had we been competitive, our early ranked games should have been devalued if we'd won? How do you decide if beating the #5 team in December is more valuable than beating the #15 team in February?
More often than not, "this team is really coming on late" is just a way to apologize for a popular team that underachieved. Not to mention it doesn't even work. UVA came off an ACC title and 8 straight wins to become the first #1 to ever lose in the first round. By 20.
The nature of basketball is that on a given night just about any team can beat any other team, which gets shown year after year, game after game in the NCAA tournament when 1 game decides your season. Teams should earn their spots, not skip to the front of the line thanks to a few late wins.
