NCAA provides glimpse into process of choosing teams for March Madness

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 colorcoded 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.

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 peek at the current top 16 seeds last week and will begin the process of setting the field the Wednesday before Selection Sunday.

The days are long as the committee works through what feels like a 10,000-piece puzzle where some of the pieces don’t seem to fit.

“It’s a national tournament, so you want to get it right,” Worlock said.

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.