Five things I learned about the NCAA tournament selection process
College basketball is a wonderful, brilliant, quirky, fun, exhilarating, maddening and fascinating sport. Nowhere are these descriptions more evident and do they come together as much as in a conference room at the NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis for four days every March.
Late last week, a group of media members, coaches and members of the Women's Basketball Coaches Association came together by invitation of the NCAA to take part in a mock selection process. Mechelle Voepel attended last season; I was one of the lucky ones this time around.
Now, this was not a new process for me; I've gone through it as a "committee of one" countless times in the past eight seasons. But I did have questions, the need for clarification and the desire to know how the selection committee does this as a group. And thanks to Sue Donohoe, NCAA vice president of Division I women's basketball, and Michelle Perry, director of the Division I women's basketball championship, and their staff, all the questions were answered.
Here's much of what we learned in those two days:
Democracy reigns
This is a true committee. Everything is done by vote. A ballot is used on everything from putting together the initial group of teams to discuss for at-large consideration to who will be the No. 5 team on the S-curve to which teams will be No. 16 seeds. If there happened to be more time, we might even have been allowed to vote on what to have for dinner.
Discussions are open. Anything can be said. The good, the bad and the ugly of each team are fair game unless a committee member is affiliated with the school. If your school is up for debate, you may not participate and must leave the room. The public perception that there is politicking and posturing isn't true. The conversations are honest and unbiased.
Here's the perfect example: I represented the seat of Judy Southard, LSU senior associate athletic director and former committee chairwoman. When the Lady Tigers came up late Thursday evening, I promptly was asked to leave the room. So I grabbed my water bottle and headed for the hallway, where for five minutes I was flooded by the memory of eighth-grade Spanish class and the punishment that came with talking too much (always in English) during a vocabulary lesson. A strange feeling it is, being banished to solitude in an empty hallway as an adult, but it's a simple way to a fairer selection process.
Principle and procedures: serious business
Getting this done correctly and without bias, even unintentional bias, requires that all the principles used for picking and bracketing the field be applied across the board. The procedures must be followed in order, completely and without exception.
First, the 33 at-large teams must be chosen. Then the field must be seeded (that essentially is done by establishing the S-curve -- the ranking of all 64 teams in order, which also provides the seeds), then the field is bracketed. Then the first- and second-round sites are added. These steps must be followed in order. One area has to be completed before the next is begun. That is important so the temptation for even unintentional manipulation is eliminated. For instance, by making sure the first- and second-round sites aren't even looked at until the end, nowhere in the process might a host team gain or lose a vote just to make some of the other principles easier to follow.
Principles -- such as ensuring that teams from the same conference do not meet until the regional finals or that no more than two teams from the same conference can appear in the same region unless nine teams from one league are selected or that the higher-ranked teams get placed in their closest regional (more on the geography angle later) -- are sometimes difficult to follow and can easily conflict with each other. Still, the committee must find a way to never violate a principle. That applies everywhere and was a fact of which we were reminded regularly by our NCAA overseers.
Throughout the mock bracket, it became evident that I have been following the steps and principles just as the committee does. However, I did discover two concepts that need emphasizing:
1. A difference exists between a "principle" and an "additional consideration." I've already mentioned some of the key "principles" above. An "additional consideration" might be avoiding rematches of previous NCAA tournament matchups, preventing first- or second-round rematches of two teams that met earlier in the season, or keeping a top seed from playing on a lower seed's home floor in the early rounds. The committee would like to always avoid those situations but it won't do so if that means violating a principle. The principles take precedence.
2. Problems are dealt with as they come up and not saved until the bracket is complete. The best example of that was when we immediately noticed a regular-season rematch in one of our 8 vs. 9 matchups. We were instructed to correct it right then if we could do so without disregarding a principle. Coming back to it later could just open the door to more resulting problems.
Location, location, location
This was probably the greatest area of clarification for someone who has put together his fair share of brackets, the subject from which most of my questions on Selection Monday are derived.
Once the S-curve is established, teams are placed in the bracket, starting at the top. But are teams placed according to S-curve ranking (i.e., the No. 1 overall in the same regional as the No. 8 overall, No. 2 with No. 7, and so on) or are they placed based on their geographical proximity to that particular regional? Because the committee doesn't release its S-curve, that was sometimes difficult to tell. Well, now we have the answer: geography.
The teams are taken in order of their S-curve standing and are then placed in the nearest regional. For instance, say Louisville is No. 5 on the S-curve. With all four regionals still open for 2-seeds, the Cardinals would go to Raleigh, N.C., because it's closest. It would not necessarily matter whether that's where the No. 4 overall team was also placed.
The only exception to this in 2009 is that California, regardless of where the Bears come up on the S-curve, can't be placed in the Berkeley Regional because they have played more than three games at Haas Pavilion this season. That's a situation unique to this season, however. Otherwise, the geography-first principle stays in place.
Technology = tremendous
We were provided with laptops that contained all the information any committee member could want on a particular team with a few keystrokes. Team data could be placed side by side for easier comparisons. Schedules, RPIs, conference record, nonconference schedule strength -- everything that goes into what is commonly known as the Nitty Gritty Report was all there. To have all that information so close and in one spot was the envy of this Bracketologist. Yet the most impressive piece of fingertip-available information was the part of the computer program that allows the committee to see exactly how far an institution is from a regional site merely by placing the mouse over that school during the bracketing stage. It's like Google Maps for dummies. It's a great tool.
Conference affiliation isn't considered
As a collective women's college basketball nation -- media, fans and coaches -- we have tended to get caught up counting how many teams a particular conference gets into the tournament. Why? It's fun. Using tournament bids as a way to debate the merits of a league in a given year makes for interesting conversation. The reality, though, is that when picking teams for the tournament, this is not a consideration.
However, it would be a lie to say league affiliations weren't discussed in many of our preliminary discussions. Although the statement, "The Big 12 is a better league than the Pac-10, so Texas Tech's accomplishments are more significant than UCLA's" wasn't made, similar things were said on many occasions. Each time, the committee was reminded (and suitably humbled) that such connections are not and should not be made. We were falling into that same misconception and were caught every time.
Then an amazing thing happened when we got down to the brass tacks of selecting our 64-team field. No team's conference ties ever came up. No tally was kept of how many Big East or ACC teams made our fantasy tournament. Once the voting began, a team was a team and that was it. Any conversations that took place were devoid of conference chatter. And the best part was that we didn't even notice. We filled a portion of our field (time constraints didn't allow us to finish the entire field using the voting process) without sliding into the mistakes of the earlier talks. It wasn't until near our adjournment time of about 10 o'clock Thursday evening that this was pointed out to us. We began to act like a real selection committee by accident. Admittedly, it felt pretty good.
In fact, the entire process felt good. It's fun, but exhausting, and we didn't do half the work the real committee does. The work involved really is extensive, and just by sitting in those seats for two days, it becomes easy to realize how much these 10 people put into this task that is so widely analyzed and scrutinized. Going in, I knew this was an extremely difficult process. What I learned coming out is what a great responsibility it truly is.
Charlie Creme can be reached at cwcreme@yahoo.com.
