Committee hands out Big Dance invitations

The NCAA Tournament selection committee has a hard time deciding who will dance, with whom and where during March Madness. Everyone's been there. You get your grades and feel slighted. You say to yourself, "I can't believe I got a B+, I deserved an A-. I knew that teacher hated me." In reality, though, the determination of a grade comes during a very stressful period for many instructors, one when they have to summarize a vast array of students' performances for an entire semester in a matter of days on the heels of marking final exams. No matter how hard they work, or how impartial teachers try to be, a handful of students always end up on the short end of the stick. Much the same can be said for the NCAA Tournament selection process. Within the space of one short weekend a committee of eight individuals must decide who will have the right to play in the land's most spectacular sporting event, how they will be seeded and where they will play. Factor into this equation the work the committee must do to insure the competitiveness and integrity of the tournament. Squeeze the whole mess into a span of a few days, and you've got a headache somewhere near the size of the check CBS sends the NCAA annually for the right to televise the tournament. Last weekend, when committee members converged on Kansas City to draw up the tournament pool, the first decision they had to make was the one that perennially proves to be the most controversial -- the determination of the 34 at-large bids to be distributed. This already tough choice is complicated by the fact that a number of conference tournament games are unfolding simultaneously. "The biggest problem with the seeding process is that there are games with major ramifications on the Sunday [when the selection is completed]," said Davidson University athletic director and selection committee member Terry Holland. Without a doubt, the committee's decisions on the distribution of at-large invites are the most subjective it makes all weekend. While the ultimate decision as to who will go to the big dance boils down to a matter of preference, a number of structured steps are taken en route to that decision. One objective factor considered in every step of the procedure is the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI), the vaunted power rankings by which so many fans are mystified. The RPI has been subject to a great deal of conjecture over the years, with even some of the most astute followers of the college game believing it takes anything from point differential to a coach's selection of game day apparel into consideration. On the contrary, the RPI is an astonishingly simple mathematical device, which according to the NCAA, requires "only a calculator and access to the results of every Division I game to compute." The tabulation takes three factors directly into consideration: a team's Division I winning percentage, its opponents' winning percentage, and those opponents' opponents' winning percentage. These considerations take a weight of 25 percent, 50 percent and 25 percent respectively. Notice, nowhere are margins of defeat or victory thrown into the fray. The NCAA also computes a fourth, supplementary factor to serve as a curve of sorts for those teams that went out of their way to schedule tough non-conference games, like Penn's duels with Michigan and UMass. A school receives bonus points if half its non-conference opponents are among the top 50 in the straight RPI, the one based solely on winning percentages. Any wins a team may have notched over such lofty competition further boosts its score. All that aside, when the committee members arrived in Kansas City selection weekend, they were expected to have composed a personal list of teams to which they wanted to extend at-large bids. Although not required, the NCAA recommends these picks come from the top 102 teams in the RPI. "If all anyone used to make the field was the RPI, you wouldn't need a [selection] committee," Harris said. While the NCAA has outlined the at-large determination process in a very detailed manner, the pages of procedures and by-laws can be summarized into one statement -- the best 34 teams that have not received an automatic bid go to the tournament. Of course, it's not that simple. For every team "on the bubble," concerned committee members may request an in-depth analysis of those squads' seasons. When all is said and done, the cream, for the most part, rises. At this point, though, there is still a great deal more to be decided, namely the seeding and geographic placement of teams in the brackets. To this end, the committee begins by voting on the top eight teams in the tournament field, assigning them rankings of 1 to 8. The committee than continues down the line until every team has been assigned a number from 1 to 64. This ordering, called an S-curve, is not used to determine which is the single best team in the field, but rather for the purpose of placing teams in the bracket. Once the S-curve has been established, the committee can begin the tedious process of creating the four regional brackets. Across the regions, each particular seed should represent the same caliber of team. Finally the placement can begin. The committee zips down the S-curve placing each seed in the geographic region closest to the location of the school it represents. If two schools with the same seed are located in the same area of the country, then the one with the higher place on the S-curve gets to stay close to home for the tourney, while the other packs extra socks for a long trip. This part of the process sounds simple enough. All the committee needs to do is pluck the teams into the slots based on how they ranked them. If only it were so easy. At this point the committee has the enviable task of examining the brackets with a fine tooth comb to make sure no possible early round games are repeats of regular season contests or of games in last year's tournament. They also have to be sure no team is playing on its home floor, defined as an arena in which it has played at least three times during the season. All this scrutiny can cause a great shifting of the ideal tournament structure. The committee, however, does not seek to preclude the inevitable home crowds created by a team playing near its home base. Sound like a lot to swallow? Well, quite frankly it is. But the eight dedicated individuals who take it upon themselves to design the tournament field wouldn't have it any other way. While Holland admits "it's not a perfect process," it is indeed quite pure. The fact of the matter is it would be impossible for the committee to satisfy everyone. Omissions are bound to happen. Somebody has to play in Idaho. These are all realities of the selection process.