Nothing to mock when trying to set NCAA Tournament field

Randy Holtz, Rocky Mountain News

Published February 12, 2007 at midnight

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INDIANAPOLIS - We came. We saw. We were blown away.

I spent 12 unforgettable hours Wednesday with 19 of my basketball-writer buddies at NCAA headquarters, the proud and rather surprised recipient of an invitation to be part of an unprecedented NCAA Tournament mock selection seminar.

In a simulated, truncated version of the five-day process the actual NCAA selection committee goes through, we woebegone scribes were given mock keys to the vehicle that drives one of the most stirring sports spectacles on Earth.

For 12 hours, we were the committee. Guided by a group of surpassingly accommodating NCAA staffers, the 20 of us sat around a large, rectangular setup of tables adorned with high-tech computer monitors.

In an exercise designed to be as much like the real process as possible, we selected, seeded and bracketed a 65-team mock NCAA Tournament field.

It was exhilarating. It was exhausting. It was illuminating. It was intense.

Every writer there - and we can be an exceedingly cynical lot - came away with a sincere appreciation of the impossibility of the real committee's task. Every writer there, when our simulated work was complete, stumbled out of the NCAA building into the frigid Indiana night swearing we never again would rip the selection committee.

The cynical-reporter side of me figured that's why the NCAA honchos embraced this scribes-as-committee-members thing, which was suggested and brokered by the U.S. Basketball Writers Association.

It would show us smart-aleck, uncaring journalistic wretches how insanely difficult the committee's task really is.

I'm still convinced that was part of it.

But the main reason, I know now, is NCAA types were getting so tired of the myriad misconceptions surrounding the selection process that they were more than happy to shed some outside light on the process.

And, boy, there was plenty of light shed.

All a blur

The group of 20 showed up at NCAA headquarters at 1:30 p.m. Each of us was paired with a partner writer, mine being Marlen Garcia, a cool and talented woman who writes college hoops for USA Today and lives in Chicago.

Each media pair represented one of the 10 actual committee members.

Our assigned committee member was Stan Morrison, the athletic director at UC Riverside.

The next 12 hours was a blur of ballots, RPI computer rankings and spirited discussion on the merits of Team A vs. Team B vs. Team C.

It occurred to me, college basketball fans who think the committee plays favorites are terribly misguided.

The committee has no time to play favorites. The committee genuinely wants the best 34 at-large teams in the field to join the 31 automatic qualifiers and works like crazy to make that happen.

History doesn't count. Brand names don't count. Famous coaches don't count. Star players don't count. It's all about the overall quality of the teams, and the NCAA has devised a dizzying number of tools to judge and compare that nebulous quality.

If your team gets into the field, there are plenty of reasons. If it doesn't, there are plenty of reasons.

NCAA's guiding light

Our sherpa was Greg Shaheen, who never could have worked for the old, pompous, buttoned-down, we-can-do-anything-we-darned-well-please NCAA. But the new NCAA is smart enough to know public perception is important, so people such as the bright, funny, relentlessly likable Shaheen have been hired to make the NCAA consumer friendly.

Shaheen, who has been at the NCAA for seven years, carries the title of senior vice president of basketball and business strategies. Whether that 17-syllable title can fit on a business card is dicey, but spending a day with Shaheen is a mind-altering experience.

He's the guy who guides the real committee through its duties, and on this day, he was guiding us.

It was nearly cinematic the way Shaheen choreographed the proceedings, alternately chiding us and humoring us as we voted and conferred and argued.

Pat Forde, a longtime friend who covers college basketball for ESPN.com, turned to me at one point and whispered, "This guy is the Rain Man of the NCAA selection process. He sees brackets in his sleep."

He just might. But on this day, no one was sleeping. We enthusiastically followed Shaheen's lead and did our best to please him, to please the other NCAA staffers, to get as much as we could out of this rare experience.

At the end, after we produced our bracket at 1 a.m., an hour past our prescribed deadline, I asked Shaheen why in the world the NCAA would allow a bunch of scummy sportswriters into its inner sanctum. He smiled.

"We've never done this before," Shaheen said. "You are the first focus group who has ever been through this. But we thought it was important to make the process more transparent to the public. We thought it was important to open up the process. It's an effort to show you we are human beings and this is a human process.

"The bottom line is, we're human beings trying to do the best we possibly can. But a lot of the perceptions of the media and the public are so far off from the reality of the process, we felt it was time to shed some light on it."

The light has been shed.

I have covered 20 Final Fours. I have tried to crawl inside the committee members' minds for two decades with my annual late-February tournament-field predictions.

And I left that building humbled and impressed.

Thank you, NCAA.

Five common misconceptions about the selection process

Rocky Mountain News college basketball writer Randy Holtz came away thinking differently about the NCAA Tournament selection process after spending Wednesday helping choose and put together a mock bracket as a pretend committee member at NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis.

1. Conference affiliation, in and of itself, is highly overrated.

Playing in a high-end conference, such as the Atlantic Coast or Southeastern, helps a team play a tougher schedule, which is crucial in the selection process.

All the teams on the so-called bubble are subjected to the same multifaceted scrutiny, regardless of conference.

The committee doesn't say, "The ACC was really good this year, so let's put in seven teams from the ACC."

And it doesn't say, "The Mountain West doesn't deserve more than two teams."

When the mock committee produced the bracket after 12 hours of deliberation, NCAA staffer and tournament selection guru Greg Shaheen asked the room, "How many times did we discuss how many teams should make it from any one conference?"

The answer was never.

2. A team's Rating Percentage Index, a mathematical approximation of its strength largely dependent on the quality of its schedule, is one of several tools the committee uses to select and seed teams.

A team's seasonlong profile, which can be accessed on the NCAA's intricate computer program, has 16 categories to decipher among teams.

"If the RPI was the only thing that mattered, we'd just pick the top 34 teams in the RPI for the at-large spots and go home," a committee chairman once said. "There's a lot more to it than that."

3. Computers don't pick the teams. People do.

As scientific and computerized as the process has become, there still is plenty of room for the human element in the discussion of teams.

Committee members, some of whom are athletic directors who once coached major college basketball, are required to watch games in person and on television all season, especially in specific conferences assigned to them.

Sometimes, when the committee is scrutinizing the at-large candidacy of two teams, a member will be asked something such as, "If you were a coach and you had to beat one of these teams in an important game, which one would you rather play?"

4. A team's legacy and history before the current season means nothing.

Neither does its star appeal.

"We're not voting on brand names, and we don't care if a team has a recognizable star player," Shaheen said. "Our job is to place the 34 best at-large teams in the field to go along with the 31 automatic qualifiers. Period."

In other words, if you're Texas and you're on the bubble, you're not getting in the field simply because freshman forward Kevin Durant is one of the most exciting and dynamic players in the nation. You're getting in only if you're judged to be a better team than your competitors for a tournament bid.

5. Selection committee members are not aging, staid, conservative, humorless academicians wearing three-piece suits with ties tightly knotted at the tops of their Brooks Brothers dress shirts.

During marathon meetings, committee members are encouraged to wear whatever makes them comfortable.

"If that's a tank top, fine. If it's a kilt, that's OK, too," said Shaheen, an NCAA staffer who guides the committee through the five-day on-site selection process. "These guys dress pretty much like you people are dressed right now."

And he was talking to a room filled with sportswriters, one of whom was wearing a bowling shirt.

Looking out for No. 1

• These four teams currently are at the top of the charts, at least in the minds of the mock committee:

San Jose Regional: UCLA

People thought guard Jordan Farmar's departure would knock the Bruins down a peg, but UCLA again is in the national-title hunt, with the help of veterans Arron Afflalo , right, and Luc Richard Mbah a Moute.

San Antonio Regional: Florida

• With high-end, experienced talent such as Joakim Noah, right, Al Horford, Corey Brewer and Lee Humphrey, it's hard to imagine the Gators not making a significant tournament run.

St. Louis Regional: Wisconsin

• Bo Ryan is on the verge of coaching stardom, and forward Alando Tucker, right, is a strong, slashing scoring machine. The Badgers have been the class of the Big Ten Conference all season.

East Rutherford Regional: North Carolina

• Roy Williams always seems to come up with something, doesn't he? This season, he has concocted an interesting stew, highlighted by young talent and the relentless Tyler Hansbrough.

holtzr@RockyMountainNews.com

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