By Patrick Netherton, Demon Sports Network play by play announcer
This time of year, I spend my days and nights telling you about the Northwestern State basketball team, and we all dream of a return to the magic kingdom best known as March Madness -- the NCAA Tournament.
Having seen it up close in the Demons of Destiny's fantastic 2006 trip to Auburn Hills, Mich., I thought I had a pretty good understanding of what goes into the tournament operations. But picking the field -- that's another matter entirely.
It's what spawns endless discussions of matchups as millions of us pick our brackets. There's always speculation about agendas by the selection committee looking for the sexy TV matchups, or taking care of a coaching icon with a favorable draw, or sticking it to some school by sending them into an unwelcome pairing against a bitter rival. It's the college basketball equivalent of the movie "Conspiracy Theory."
It's fun. It has endless permutations. And it is completely, totally, utterly baseless. I know because I've just seen behind the curtain, and there is no little man, or even the Great and Powerful Oz, turning the switches and making the matchups.
I had the opportunity on Friday, Feb. 13 to participate in the NCAA Tournament Mock Selection Committee. If you don't know what that means, basically, the NCAA had decided in 2007 to try to de-mystify the entire men's basketball tournament selection process by which they make the bracket for the NCAA basketball tournament. They started by inviting big-name basketball media types (read: Andy Katz of ESPN.com, etc) to allow them to see how the process actually worked.
Two years later, it trickled all the way down to me. It didn't hurt that I was serving as a correspondent for The Tim Brando Show on Sporting News Radio, thanks to my friend and golfing buddy Timmy B., who lives in Shreveport. Because of a late scratch and my availability on short notice, I was in.
And being in is something I will not soon forget.
Like every other college basketball fan, I heard and occasionally subscribed to the rumors, the mindset that in some way the thing was fixed. That Ben Howland of UCLA playing the team he just left, Pitt, in a second-round matchup set up just for the sake of the television audiences. That CBS had some control over the matchups in order to make the tournament more interesting. That certain teams were put to the screws because of who their coach is or what conference they play in, yada, yada, yada. Come to find out, none of these scenarios hold water.
If the mock selection process accomplished only one thing, it affirmed that there is no politics involved. CBS has no sway. The mid-majors are represented only if they deserve to be. What conference your team is in doesn't matter. The selection process is bias-free and amazingly simple, while having as many layers as a large-sized onion.
What I came to realize throughout the process is that it is very regimented. I had visions of people arguing and ultimately saying, "Okay, let's make North Carolina a one-seed. That sounds good, let's do it." But what you find out is that everything in that room is done via secret ballot. Every committee member (there are 10) has a computer in front of them which they vote on, all in secret. The individual votes are never revealed, but the final tallies are.
There are three separate parts to the process: Selection (putting teams in the field), Seeding (ranking the teams and putting them on seed lines) and Bracketing (the very last thing the commitee does, assigning regions and matchups).
When the commitee walks in the door, they have a ballot filled out to start the selection process. It includes up to 34 teams they believe are absolute locks to be in the tournament as at-large teams, and then as many teams they believe should be under consideration for being one of the top 34. What I found out is that the automatic qualifiers (teams who won their conference tournament to earn a berth) are never really factored. All the committee cares about is who are the best 34 teams.
So when the ballots are tabulated, any team that received 8 of 10 votes to be in the tournament as an at-large (AL) were in the tournament. Our mock committee put 24 teams in on the initial ballot (usually 18-26 are put in on the initial ballot). Those are the no-brainers: Duke, Carolina, UConn, Pitt, etc.
Then we had all the teams that received at least two votes for being under consideration (UC). Unfortunately, we had 49 of those. Clearly some committee members (we were partnered up, so we had 20 people on our mock committee) were confused about the selection criteria. If we believed that a team was one of the best 34, we should put them under consideration. If not, we do not include them. So we quickly eliminated the five teams that ONLY received two votes and were left with a pool of 44 teams to select from to try to fill out the rest of the tournament.
That is when the voting process began and this selection began to take the feel of a math equation. We were given the entire pool of 44 UC (teams "under consideration," remember?) candidates and were asked to pick the top 8 of those 44. Once the top 8 were established (via secret vote), we were asked to rank those 8 from 1 to 8.
Thus began the "List 8, Rank 8" process which is at the heart of the process. Once the votes were tallied, the top 4 vote getters were put into the tournament field. The four that were not selected were held over for the next vote. So we listed the best eight of the remaining 36 UC teams, then ranked those eight from 1 to 8. The top four of those joined the four holdovers from the last vote and we ranked those eight teams again. The top four vote-getters were put into the tournament field. It is "List 8, Rank 8," then the top four get in, over and over again, a methodical but thorough and infinitely fair approach to creating March Madness.
The "List 8, Rank 8" process is quite stunning to consider first-hand for the first time. Via secret electronic vote, you whittle all of these teams down, until you are starting to really populate your field. It is also used in Seeding, which is where we turned next.
Since we had the top teams in the field (thanks to the initial ballot), we could turn our attention to the seeding process and start to define the top four seeds in the tournament. "List 8, Rank 8" comes back up in this process. We picked the top eight teams from everyone in the pool (we had fictional results from conference tournaments as we went along to help us determine automatic qualifiers) made up of our at-large selections and automatic qualifiers. We then ranked those eight teams 1 to 8.
The top four vote getters were our top four seeds: UNC, UConn, Pitt and Oklahoma. All of our selections were based on actual results as of the night before, Feb. 12, and the fictional results from conference tournaments that the NCAA staff were giving us.
We once again chose the top eight teams from the remaining teams in the tournament and the top four joined the four holdovers from the last ballot. Those eight were ranked 1 to 8 and the top four of those became our second seeds: Clemson, Michigan State, Duke and Memphis. That process continued until we had populated our top four seed lines.
After that, we went back and put another group of teams in the tournament, got more automatic qualifier results and then went back to seeding. We alternated putting teams in the tournament and seeding, all the while using the "List 8, Rank 8" process until we had the tournament field set (for the sake of brevity, the NCAA did seed the 10-16 lines for us by RPI so we could move on to bracketing).
We began bracketing, a process which actually happens over only about two hours or so before the committee hands their bracket to CBS, so it is fast and furious. We started with the overall number one seed, North Carolina, who had earned the right to play as close to home as possible. We ended up putting them in the East Regional (Boston) then switched them to the South (Memphis) because it made the whole process easier with UConn in the East, Oklahoma in the West (Glendale) and Pitt in the Midwest (Indianapolis). We basically saved all four of those teams, and their fans, some large travel headaches.
We then bracketed the two seeds, within the principles of the bracketing process. One of the major ones is that the top three teams from a conference cannot be in the same region, so we had to separate UNC, Duke and Clemson. You also cannot have two teams from the same conference playing before the regional finals. That makes it a little tougher as you go along, and what you find is that you may have made a team a 7-seed, but because of the bracketing principles, they cannot fit on the 7-seed line, so you have to bump them to an 8-seed. So basically, the seeds you see on your bracket may not necessarily be the ones they were voted in at, but were adjusted into due to bracketing.
The rest of the bracketing is a numbers game. What is the closest place for a team to play? The higher seed has earned the right to play closer to home. In its entirety, the bracketing process took about 30 minutes and we had a completed bracket.
The most amazing part of the process is that no one had any idea how many teams came out of each conference nor what the potential matchups were until the brackets were printed and handed to us. That is the beauty of this process. You cannot cheat, you cannot rip off a team, you cannot make things go your way. There are 10 votes (sometimes less: a conference commissioner cannot vote on teams from his conference, and an AD at a school cannot vote or discuss his/her school) and you need 8 votes to make something happen.
So as you can see, the process is clean, it's pure, it's simple and yet so complex. Take your conspiracy theories and throw them out the window.
This process works and it works the right way...fairly.
