March 15, 2009

Commentary: The Making of the Madness

NCAA selection process a matter of principles
By Patrick Netherton
Special to The Times

Editor's Note: Patrick Netherton is the voice of Northwestern State athletics. He was offered an
opportunity to participate in this year's NCAA Tournament Mock Selection Committee.

INDIANAPOLIS — When the NCAA Tournament brackets are announced today, you may find
yourself falling back on the old conspiracy theories surrounding the field: certain teams were
shafted by the committee, matchups were made for TV, some coaches or schools were treated
preferably because of their name.

I am here to tell you that having been a part of one of the mock selection committees, you can
throw all of the conspiracy theories out the window. None of them hold water.

The NCAA Tournament is the fairest, most equitable and evenly handled selection process
around. It is a beautiful combination of human interaction and passion mixed with calculated
mathematics and secret voting.

I was honored with the opportunity to participate in the NCAA Tournament Mock Selection
Committee in February. Twenty people paired up to act as one of the 10 members of the real
committee. We were taken through the journey of creating a bracket like the real committee does,
just in a condensed, 11-hour time period.

The backbone of the selection process is the voting. Every decision is handled via secret voting
process with eight of the 10 selection committee members needing to agree to make any decision
happen. So no matter how persuasive an argument or how ridiculous an idea, eight of the
members have to agree for it to happen.

That process alone makes conspiring to stick it to a team or giving a team a better seed because
of their name almost impossible, unless you could convince eight fair-minded people to go along
with the idea.

The other major conspiracy is the matchups. A couple of years ago, Ben Howland of UCLA faced
Pitt, his old team, in the second round. The conspiracy theorists just knew that the committee had
created that matchup for television, but that idea was wrong.

The bracketing process is the very last thing that happens in the room, and it usually takes place
only hours before the CBS selection show. It is a fast and furious affair, with teams being put into
the bracket based on seeding and distance traveled and whether they fit into the bracketing
principles: the top three teams from a conference have to be put in different regions; teams from
the same conference cannot play each other until the regional finals; try to avoid rematches of
regular-season games.

Bracketing only takes place after all of the teams have been selected and seeded, which are the
other two parts of the committee's job. The committee spends days haggling and voting, over and
over, to put teams into the tournament and figuring where to seed them, one through 65. It is only
at the very end that they assign them to regions and put together the matchups, thus creating the
bracket.
The real secret of the selection process is that while the committee may put a team in as a five
seed, because of the bracketing principles, that team may not fit in on the five line, meaning they
may get moved to a six seed. And a six seed, conversely, may get bumped up to a five. So if you
think a certain team seems seeded a spot too low or too high, the committee may have seeded
them there initially but were forced to move them because of the bracketing principles.

And the idea that the conference affiliation has anything to do with the process is also wrong. The
committee members don't even talk about conferences. Every team is one of 330 teams to be
looked at no matter what league they play in. As a matter of fact, in our mock committee we had
the media relations director of the ACC. Not until we had bracketed the field and had finished and
were looking at our printed bracket did he even realize how many teams had made it into the
tournament from his own league.

The committee members are fair and even-handed, almost to a fault. They cannot be in the room
when their team (for athletic directors) or their conference (for conference commissioners) are
being discussed. They are exhaustive in their preparation, passionate in their discussion and
relentless in their pursuit of the perfect bracket.

In the end, the real March Madness is in that selection room: five days worth of hard work,
discussion and voting, which ultimately leads to the best, fairest and most equitable tournament in
college athletics.

That is the type of conspiring we should all get behind.