NCAA provides a glimpse into picks

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 selection committee used to sort through all the teams with enough paper to kill a forest, as the NCAA’s L.J. Wright put it, building brackets on large posterboards with Velcro that would have to constantly be replaced from swapping teams around.

Technology has streamlined the process, including a spreadsheet with color-coded boxes that immediately determine whether a team can play at a certain site or not. It even provides a school’s distance to each site and which ones will need charter flights.