Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 3, 1991 TAG: 9103030109
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL BRILL EXECUTIVE SPORTS EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
They include chairman Jim Delany, commissioner of the Big Ten; Southeastern Conference commissioner Roy Kramer; Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference commissioner Ken Free; and the following athletic directors:
Duke's Tom Butters, California's (soon to be Miami's) Dave Maggard, Syracuse's Jake Crouthamel, Iowa's retiring Bump Elliott, Dayton's Tom Frericks and Gary Cunningham of Fresno State.
These nine members of the NCAA Basketball Committee, with considerable help from NCAA officials Dave Cawood and Tom Jernstedt, face the tedious task of selecting and seeding the 64-team NCAA Tournament, scheduled to start a week later.
Their target time is 6:30 p.m. Sunday, when CBS will televise the pairings for collegiate sports' biggest show.
The one thing you can be certain of is that no matter how you think the teams are selected, you are inaccurate.
The evolution of the selection process has been refined almost annually. "Evolved is the right word," said Delany, who has served on the committee all six years since the field was increased to 64 teams in 1985.
"There is more credibility now," he said, "but the stakes are higher.
"This has become one of the outstanding athletic events in the world. It's a fairly sophisticated process. We have better data now. We're better organized, with better information."
But, as Delany stresses, "There is still a human element," so every year when the field is announced, there are sure to be complaints from schools that fell off the bubble.
(The selection process has gained so much attention in recent years that the phrase "on the bubble" has arisen, although nobody is certain how it originated as a reference to not getting into the basketball tournament.)
The tournament began in 1939 with eight teams, was expanded to 16 in 1951 and 1952, then fluctuated between 22 and 25 teams from 1953-1974.
It was only after an overtime loss by third-ranked Maryland to eventual NCAA champion North Carolina State in 1974 that the rules were changed to permit more than one school from any conference.
A 32-team bracket was adopted in '75, increased to 40 in '79 and to 48 the following year, when more than two schools from one league were permitted. In 1983, the field increased to 52 teams, and another team was added in 1984.
The 64-team format began in 1985. Delany will not say that this size is forever. "Every year we have fine-tuned," he said. "But the history of this event is that it grew every five years or so."
Still, things are vastly different now than they were even in the late '70s, when Dave Gavitt was on the committee.
Gavitt, formerly the Big East commissioner and now an executive with the Boston Celtics and president of USA Basketball, said, "We used to come in on Friday, stay at a Holiday Inn on the highway near the NCAA [headquarters] and use an NCAA conference room. That was spartan."
Now, Cawood said, "We take an entire floor [at the Hyatt]. We turn it into two big suites. We take the furniture out of one of the suites and use that as a meeting room. There is food in one suite, and they work in the other one." The committee is locked in until late Sunday afternoon.
The committee's task is to create the best-balanced field it possibly can from the 30 automatic qualifiers and the 34 at-large selections.
Listed on 15 pages of information available to every committee member are the objectives that will be followed for the next three days:
Select the best teams available, regardless of conference affiliation, for the at-large berths.
There is no limit on the number of teams that may be selected from one conference.
The top priority is to balance the bracket in each region across the country.
Keep teams in or as close as possible to their areas of natural interest without compromising the principles of the seeding.
"We need new names for the regions," Cawood said. One problem in the bracketing is that the same site - Atlanta or Charlotte, for example - might be in the East one year and in the Southeast another. Richmond was in the Southeast in 1990.
All No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 and No. 4 seeds in each grouping of four shall be equally as capable.
Two teams from the same conference within the same region shall not be seeded together. (Teams from the same league may not play until the regional finals; in 1991, no team is permitted to play on its home court, determined as a facility where it played three regular-season games. Three Top Ten teams - Syracuse, Arizona and Utah - have their buildings being used in first and second-round games).
These are the basic guidelines. Teams are moved in the seedings so that these guidelines can be met. And, the committee can be assured, not everybody will be happy. Nobody wants to be No. 2 in the West and bracketed with defending champion Nevada-Las Vegas.
Gavitt, who was chairman of the group in 1983 and '84 in winding up his six-year term, said, "When we went to 64, we agreed it should provide an opportunity for Cinderella. No team that has a legitimate chance to win the national championship should be left out."
On Friday morning, the work will begin.
Every committee member lists the 34 teams he thinks should make the field. Athletic directors don't vote for their own schools; commissioners don't vote for league members. Those teams that already have qualified by winning league tournaments have been placed on a board in the work room. Another board lists the at-large entries.
The NCAA staff collects and tabulates the ballots. All schools receiving six votes are nominated for movement into the at-large pool. This list will include some teams that eventually will gain entry through automatic qualification.
Schools receiving between two and five votes are listed separately.
At that time, the staff reveals the names of conferences that did not have any teams nominated as at-large candidates. The committee identifies those leagues to receive only the automatic bid. They later may add to that list.
The committee begins evaluating the teams nominated for the at-large pool, beginning with those who got five votes and working down.
The committee uses the RPI, or Rating Percentage Index, a computer printout of rankings of all Division I teams.
In recent years, the computer has been given more credit for selection than it deserves. Delany, Gavitt and Cawood stress that it is just one of many factors that are used.
Teams are analyzed in many ways, including non-conference record, home and away; conference finish; record against teams in top 50, top 100, last 150; how opponents fared, home and away; last 12 games; Sagarin rating in USA Today; good victories; bad victories; and advisory committee ranking.
"There are four regional advisory committees," Gavitt said. "They rate teams in their area, on-going, throughout the season."
There also is room for extra comments, something that will stress this team isn't the team it once was. The death of Loyola Marymount's Hank Gathers is an extraordinary situation, but there are numerous cases in which a star player may either have just gotten hurt or is returning from injury. Those factors are taken into consideration.
The committee compares teams in groups of two or three, constantly taking secret ballots. It takes six votes for any team to move to the at-large board.
The voting proceeds, team by team, until 34 are selected. These, however, are not necessarily the final 34. "I've seen teams taken off the board," Cawood said.
As far as the RPI is concerned, Cawood said, "It identifies some teams that the committee might not have looked at otherwise. The best thing the computer does is ensure that the committee will look at every team that has a good record."
Counting the automatic qualifiers, the committee usually can reach as many as 60 teams without too much difficulty. "When they reach 60, there could be as many as 20 teams left," Cawood said.
"The last four, five or six teams, it comes down to an analysis of every game on the schedule," Gavitt said. "Then, as the chair, I'd say, `Let's start over again.' We would analyze the teams we didn't take."
Gavitt said it was important not to let margin of victory become a factor "and don't overreact to one win or loss."
Eventually, the committee formally votes the 34 at-large teams into the field.
Then comes the bracketing, which is almost as complicated. The entire field is seeded, 1 through 64, and the committee uses an S-Curve, which was devised by former N.C. State athletic director Willis Casey.
In the S-Curve, 1-2-3-4 are placed on a line, followed on the next line by 5-6-7-8 in reverse order, so that the eight is under the one. All pairings add up to nine: 2-7, 3-6, 4-5. The entire field is bracketed that way.
The greatest complication is provided by the power conferences - ACC, Big East and Big Ten. The conferences will account for 15 to 18 teams in the field. More importantly, in 1990, eight of the top 16 seeds were from those three leagues; in '89, it was nine teams.
The higher-seeded teams are given the most breaks according to geographic regions, but with the three conferences providing so many of those entries, that isn't always possible.
Often, Gavitt said, one team is moved a long way, East to West, rather than move it to the next region and have to move three teams.
"You want to balance the brackets," Gavitt said, "to make all roads equal. That has created some incredible pairings, like Virginia and Boston College playing in Utah." (Followed by Virginia and N.C. State in an ACC Tournament rematch played at Weber State).
Cawood, who has no official role in the meeting, agreed it is unfortunate that some critics believe politics plays a role. Gavitt and Delany insist that simply doesn't happen.
"In the six years I was on the committee," Gavitt said, "I never heard one person shilling for a team, either theirs or a team in their conference."
Delany said nobody would appreciate the process "unless it was done on national TV for eight hours." But producing revenue is not a factor.
"Kids don't play for the money," he said. "Coaches don't play for the money."
Said Gavitt, "I think the system works."
by CNB