I know you are probably sick of reading about the selection committee and their mistakes and everything else. I understand. I don't blame you. That said, I'm going to take one more run at them. The one good thing you can say about the Selection Committee is that they were honest about their inconsistencies. Selection Committee Chairman Gary Walters, would talk about all the factors that went into deciding whether a team was in or out and if in, how they were seeded. Then, he would immediately follow it up by saying it wasn't "categorical" across the field. In other words, they didn't apply their standards consistently.
This, of course, screwed Drexel. They followed the template highly recommended by previous selection committees and perfected by the Missouri Valley Conference. They played a very challenging non-con. They went on the road for many of the games and they won a lot of those games. This covered for the weakness of the conference and even with some stumbles in conference and losing in the second round of their tournament, they finished with an RPI of 39. Suddenly, that wasn't good enough because the selection committee saw their flaws as too deep. Mainly, they lost 3 games in the conference season and lost too early in the Tournament to the eventual winner, VCU. Other schools like Bradley, Missouri St. and Utah St. suffered similar fates.
The inconsistencies also applied in the seeding with mid-majors. Creighton could be a textbook case. The Bluejays won the MVC Tournament, finished with an RPI of 20 and a non-con SOS of 24. In the final week's rankings by the AP and Coaches, they were high amongst the "others receiving votes" so that they were unofficially 29 and 27 respectively. On Selection Sunday, Creighton found itself placed in the Tournament as a #10 seed. Lumped in the same line as Texas Tech, Gonzaga and Georgia Tech.
Now, the positive way to look at this is that this selection committee took its duties to select the 34 best at-large teams very seriously and were willing to look beyond a hard formula to try and get it right. The same -- if not more so -- with the seeding. The result at least this year, a much higher number of teams represented by the major conferences and low seeding for the conference tournament winners outside of the 6 power conferences (of all the conference tournament champions, only Memphis as a #2, was seeded higher than 10th). There is nothing to say that will be the result every year.
The negative view is that the mid-major schools are screwed unless they win their conference, and even then they aren't going to be looking at a promising seed. There is no set formula or recommendations any longer to plan a schedule in advance to get into the Tournament -- other than not to lose in the non-con, the conference and probably not in the conference either (just to be safe).
I noted earlier, Committee Chair Walters' fascination with juxtaposing Jeffersonian and Jacksonian principles upon the NCAA Tournament and the selection and seeding of teams. Not to mention Walters and the committee clear distaste for Jacksonian Democracy versus Jeffersonian. This suggests that if this approach holds, then the mid-major schools are in for a rough stretch.
