NCAA basketball tournament selection process

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The selection process for College Basketball's NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship determines which 65 teams will enter the tournament, known as March Madness, and where they will be seeded and placed in the bracket. It is done by a special selection committee appointed by the NCAA. Thirty teams have automatic bids by winning their conference tournament; the Ivy League regular-season champion receives an automatic bid because the Ivy League has no conference tournament ^[1]. Therefore, only 34 teams (the at-large bids) rely on the selection committee to secure them a spot in the tournament. The selection process primarily takes place on Selection Sunday and the days leading up to it. Selection Sunday is also when the brackets and seeds are released to the public.

The procedure is virtually identical for the NCAA Women's Division I Basketball Championship except that there is no play-in game. There are 33 at-large bids in the women's tournament, for a total of 64 teams, and selections are announced the following day, or Selection Monday.

1 The selection committee
2 Selecting the field
3 Predictions and speculation
4 Seeding
5 Making the brackets
6 Selection Sunday
7 References

[edit] The selection committee

The ten-member ^[2] selection committee is made up of athletic directors and conference commissioners throughout Division I men's and women's basketball. The committee is chosen to ensure that conferences from around the country, both major and mid-major conferences are represented. Generally the men's selection committee consists of all men, and the women's selection committee consists of all women, although Judy Rose, the athletic director at Charlotte, was the men's committee chair in 2001. Currently Richard Ensor, the Commissioner of the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference, serves on the women's committee. To avoid a potential conflict of interest, committee members must leave the room when their own school (or schools, in the case of the conference commissioners) is being discussed, although they may answer factual questions (about injuries, etc.) if asked. An athletic director may be present when other schools from his or her conference are discussed, but he or she may only speak if asked.

[edit] Selecting the field

The selection committee must first decide which teams will compete in the tournament. 30 teams qualify automatically by winning their conference tournaments; one team, the Ivy League champion, qualifies automatically by winning the regular-season title, because the Ivy League does not hold a conference tournament. This ensures that every Division I conference has at least one representative in the NCAA Tournament. The only teams the selection committee selects are the 33 or 34 teams who receive at-large berths. Though each conference only receives one automatic bid, the selection committee can select any number of at-large teams from each conference.

The at-large teams generally come from basketball's power conferences: the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-10, and SEC. For example, in 2005, 25 of the 34 at-large teams in the men's tournament, and 27 of the 33 at-large teams in the women's tournament, were from those six conferences. Many of these teams, however, are "on the bubble": they do not know if they will make the tournament or not until they see their name on TV (with TV cameras documenting their reaction). The six "power conferences" are the same six conferences that receive automatic bids to the BCS bowl games in college football.

A number of teams essentially know that they are assured of an at-large berth no matter their performance in their conference tournament. Most teams in the Top 25 in the national polls or RPI are essentially guaranteed at-large berths even if they do not win their respective conference tournament. However, on a few occassions, mid-major teams that have been ranked heading into Selection Sunday, but didn't win their conference tournament, have been left out or "snubbed" by the selection committee despite what the polls may say. The Missouri Valley Conference has gotten the most snubs (5 RPI top 40 teams excluded), with Missouri State left out each of the last 9 years, despite RPI's of 21 (only team inside the top 30 to ever be excluded), 34 (fourth highest to be excluded), and 36 (fifth highest to be excluded).

[edit] Predictions and speculation

Further information: Bracketology

While the selection committee assembles to do the official work, many predictions are made by various people and organizations. Speculations and buzz can come from anywhere from random college basketball fans to senior bracketologists and experts on the selection process and the seedings, such as ESPN's Joe Lunardi. Other well-known experts in this field include Ken Pomeroy of kenpom.com, Jerry Palm of CollegeRPI.com, Gary Parrish of CBS Sportsline, David Mihm of Bracketography.com, Ryan Feldman of TheHoopsReport.com, and Chris Kulenych and Craig Gately of Bracketology 101.

Bracketology is conducted extensively for the men's tournament, although a few bracketologists also make projected brackets for the women's tournament, the most prominent being Charlie Creme's weekly projections on ESPN.com.

[edit] Seeding

The selection committee's work to seed the teams is just as vital as their work to select the at-large teams. While the selection process starts before the seeding process, the two often overlap; with conference tournaments not finishing until Selection Sunday itself, and only one hour between the end of the last game (usually the Big Ten tournament championship game) before the brackets are officially unveiled, the committee cannot wait until after all the games are played to start determining the seeds. While nothing is set in stone until after all the games are played and the brackets are established, the committee may have a good idea of where a team is and where they could rise or fall depending on their showing in the later stages of their conference tournament. The women's tournament has the luxury of an extra day from the end of games on Sunday to prepare its brackets on Monday.

Though the brackets only feature the seed numbers 1-16 in each region, the committee assembles an s-curve of teams seeded from 1-65. In theory, the teams 1-4 on the seed list will all be #1 seeds (the #1 "seed line"), 5-8 will be #2 seeds (the #2 seed line), and so on; however, bracketing rules often lead to some deviation from this. The S-curve is most important for keeping each region balanced; ideally, each region will be equally strong. For example, the committee will try to ensure that the number 1 team on the seed list, the national #1 seed, will be in the same region as the weakest #2 seed. The committee tries to ensure that the top four seeds in each region are comparable to the top four teams in every other region. For example, if one region has the best #1 seed (#1 overall), the weakest #2 seed (#8 overall), the best #3 seed (#9 overall), and the weakest #4 seed (#16 overall), its seeds add up to 34, the ideal number. But if a region has the best team for every given seed, its seeds would add up to 28, and a region with the weakest team in every seed would add up to 40, making the two regions very unbalanced. No at large bid can be lower than a #12 seed. While the seeds are almost never perfectly balanced throughout the four regions, the committee strives to ensure that they differ from each other by only a few points. The process is identical for the women's tournament, with the exception that seeding occurs to 64.

The selection committee uses a number of factors to place teams on the S-curve, including record, strength of schedule, the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI), and a team's overall performance in recent games. The RPI rating is often considered a significant factor in selecting and seeding the final few teams in the tournament field, though the selection committee stresses that the RPI is used merely as a guideline and not as an infallible indicator of a team's worth.

[edit] Making the brackets

Once the S-curve is established the committee must place the teams throughout the four regions. They were originally referred to as East, Mideast, Midwest, and West. In 1985, the Mideast designation became the Southeast, and later the South Regional in 1998. The women's tournament continued to use the Mideast terminology through 2004. In 2004, the NCAA started to identify the men's regions only by the city in which the regional semifinals and finals were played, with the same change being made for the women's tournament in 2005. The NCAA reverted to the East/South/Midwest/West designations for the men's tournament starting in 2007, but continues to designate women's regionals by their cities. Typically the cities selected will be spread throughout the country and conform roughly to the old geographic distinctions. While the regions are named for certain cities, the first and second round games are played in different cities which need not be anywhere near the regional finals. In 2005 the Austin, Texas men's regional was fed by games in Indianapolis, Indiana; Tucson, Arizona; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Worcester, Massachusetts. This is due to the "pod" system enacted before the 2002 tournament to minimize travel for as many teams as possible, especially in the early rounds. Any team may be sent to any region and any pod, although the tournament does try to keep teams, especially the top teams, closer to home. However, in 2004, Pittsburgh played its first two tournament games in Milwaukee and not in Buffalo or Columbus, cities to which it was closer. This was done to keep a lower-seeded team, the Wisconsin Badgers, close to its campus. Similarly, two east-coast teams, Maryland and Syracuse traveled to Denver, where their opening round opponents were Brigham Young University and University of Texas, El Paso, both of which were geographically closer to Denver.

A number of complex rules govern the seeding process, so it is not as simple as merely following the S-curve, although that is the top priority according to the NCAA's rules ^[3]. The better a team is, the more priority they have in remaining close to home, but no team can actually play on its home court if it is hosting tournament games (generally, games are hosted on neutral courts, so this is not usually a problem). Sometimes a top team may be a short drive away from its games; in 2006 Villanova University played its first and second round games in Philadelphia at an arena where they had played three games that year, one fewer than the four required for a site to be considered a "home court" for a team, and in 2002 the University of Pittsburgh played its first and second round games in the city of Pittsburgh. In the women's tournament, this criterion does not apply and a team that is hosting is automatically assigned its home arena, regardless of seed. Thus, occasionally, lower seeded teams will host a game. For example, in 2006 Old Dominion University, although a 10th seed, played at its home court in the first round and also would have played there in the second round had the Lady Monarchs won that game.

Teams are spread out according to conference. The first three teams selected from each conference must be placed in different regions. When a conference has more than three teams in the tournament, the committee tries to seed the teams so that they cannot meet until the regional final. Before 2006, this was an absolute rule. However, in the summer of 2005, the NCAA changed its rules to allow intraconference matchups as early as the second round of the tournament, assuming all measures to keep the teams apart until the regional finals have been exhausted. The NCAA was clearly preparing for the chance that a conference would place more than eight teams in the tournament, which became a realistic possibility when the Big East, already a power conference, expanded to 16 members, with several of the new members having traditionally strong programs.

The committee may move a team up or down one seed from its seed line in the S-curve in order to preserve other principles. While this may be seen as unfair in some instances, the seeding process is an inexact science anyway and a slight move in seeding is unlikely to affect the chances of any team.

The committee also has to worry about other non-basketball factors. In 2003 the tournament mistakenly placed BYU, a Latter-Day Saint school which has a policy of not playing games on Sunday, into a region where the team could be forced to play on a Sunday if they advanced to regional play. The NCAA then announced that they would switch BYU's region if they won their first two games, but since BYU lost, no action needed to be taken.

[edit] Selection Sunday

Selection Sunday is the day when the NCAA College basketball tournament participants are announced, placed and seeded accordingly. Both CBS and ESPN cover the selections for the men's tournament live; ESPN also covers selections for the women's tournament live. The NCAA committee gathers to select and place 65 men's teams and 64 women's teams that they deem worthy of an invitation to the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship and the NCAA Women's Division I Basketball Championship basketball tournaments that take place in March and April.

CBS has the official rights to cover the selection of the men's tournament field as the TV network which covers the vast majority of the tournament (everything except ESPN's coverage of the play-in game). For this reason, CBS announces each bracket first, followed seconds later by ESPN. Both networks' coverage is augmented by discussion of the selections and predictions about how teams will fare once the tournament begins. ESPN has exclusive rights to cover selection for the women's tournament, as that network has sole rights to the women's tournament. Before 2006, the women's matchups were made in a selection show airing one hour before the men's matchups. However, beginning in 2006, ESPN has announced women's matchups in Selection Monday. This allows ESPN to focus the evening's coverage solely on women's basketball instead of providing token coverage for the women before devoting the rest of the evening on the men's matchups.

Both networks send camera crews to schools around the nation to capture their reactions when they find out what seed they received or if they even made the tournament at all. Once the teams are announced, millions of fans start to fill in their brackets.

Selection Sunday for the 2007-2008 season was on March 16, 2008, with Selection Monday on March 17.