Sneak peak into bracket process
PHOENIX — Selection Sunday also happens to be the biggest complaint day on the sports calendar.
How could they leave my team out? Why is mine playing that far away? You seriously gave (my favorite team) a No. 8 seed instead of 6?
Settle down. Selecting, seeding and bracketing the 68 teams for the NCAA Tournament is not an exact science, yet it is rooted in methods developed through years of building brackets.
Twelve people in a room, all with proven track records in the world of college athletics, make the decisions that shape March Madness in a meticulous process that would send the average person searching for an exit.
“At the end of the day, it’s 12 opinions and their collective votes that determine all this and reasonable people can disagree about how it turns out,” said David Worlock, the NCAA’s director of media coordination and statistics.
The NCAA offered insight into the selection process less than two months before the Final Four in Glendale, Arizona, a three-hour crash course in what the selection committee does over a five-day period prior to the bracket release.
The process consists of multiple votes, discussions, side-by-side comparisons, scrubbing, team sheets, holding lists, cross-country lists and rules — lots of rules.
The process starts before the season, when committee members are assigned conferences to monitor during the season. Each conference has primary and secondary monitors who have monthly calls with the leagues for updates on statistics, injuries, suspensions — anything that could impact a school’s performance.
The committee gave a sneak peak at the current top-16 seeds last week and will begin the process of setting the field the
Wednesday before Selection Sunday.
The first step in building a bracket is determining which teams are locks to make the bracket at large, regardless of whether it could eventually represent its conference as an automatic qualifier. The bracket has 32 automatic qualifiers, leaving 36 at-large spots.
In the initial vote, committee members select no more than 24 teams they think should be an at-large selection and an unlimited number that should be under consideration to make the field. Any team that receives all but three votes in the at-large category is immediately moved into the tournament field.
Another series of votes — many, many votes — is held as the committee adds and subtracts from the at-large board. At various points, committee members rank the teams in the at-large board with the top four moving into the field.
Throughout the process are discussions about the teams — facts only, no opinions — and comparisons of team sheets, which have everything from record to strength of schedule. The NCAA Evaluation Tool breaks down teams’ records in four quadrants based on opponents’ NET ranking and where a game is played.
Once the teams are selected, the committee “scrubs” the list, going line by line. If a member believes a team should be moved up to a higher seed, a majority vote is held — often after a discussion — and the process is continued until everyone is in agreement on the seedings.
The comes bracketing. The top priority is keeping a team as close to its area as possible. The process is complicated by rules that prevent teams from the same conference playing at certain points in the NCAA Tournament depending on how many times they played during the regular season — three times and they can’t play until the regional final, for example.