Selection Sunday: It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it

Curiosity carried Lee Fowler into an Internet chat room where he expected to feel unwelcome.

It was March 2002 and Butler University basketball fans had gathered online to vent their frustrations over being the first team with 25 victories to be left out of the NCAA Tournament.

As chairman of the ‘02 NCAA selection committee, Fowler bore the brunt of the blame.

He had received 100 e-mails within two days after Butler’s bubble burst, many of the letters as unprintable as they were unforgettable.

Fowler, North Carolina State’s athletic director, answered every one. He even discussed the committee’s rationale individually with a few of the more reasonable fans to whom he had given his cellphone number.

“So when I logged onto this chat room to see what they were saying about me, I couldn’t believe they were talking me up as a nice guy just because I called,” Fowler said. “I felt like I had to respond to those people. For the good of the tournament and the selection process, they deserved a response. I felt responsible.”

That sense of responsibility among the NCAA selection committee guides members every Selection Sunday even more than RPIs; the strength of their convictions often more relevant than a team’s strength of schedule.

The 10 men who have been gathered at a downtown Indianapolis hotel since Wednesday night, none of them named Dick Vitale or Jeff Sagarin, speak with the most powerful voice in college basketball. The group understands the gravity of the statement they will make collectively today when the NCAA field of 65 is unveiled after the most taxing week of their year.

“It’s not the sort of thing you do because you want acclaim for a good job, but it has its rewards because it’s such an honorable process,” said Iowa athletic director Bob Bowlsby, the chairman of this year’s committee. “It’s one of the hardest things we do (as administrators). I tell people it’s like trying to keep plates spinning on a lot of sticks all at once.”

Averett University athletic director Charles Harris, a former NCAA selection committee member, used another circus analogy to describe the process of whittling as many as 100 worthy teams into a field of 65.

“It’s like juggling six balls in the air, except three of them are crystal and you don’t know which ones they are, so you can’t drop any of them,” Harris said.

Bowlsby left Iowa City last Monday for meetings in New York with CBS before heading to Indianapolis. He won’t return home until March 21. Harris, the former commissioner of the Mideastern Athletic Conference, used to joke that it would be winter when he left home for his committee duties and by the time he returned nearly a month later, “it was time to mow the grass.”

“I don’t want to make it sound like a Herculean process, but it’s demanding,” Harris said.

Seated at two large conference tables inside a 15th floor hotel suite, wearing “jeans and sweats,” according to Bowlsby, the committee officially convened Thursday when each member submitted two secret ballots. The first one contained the names of 34 at-large selections and the second identified any other team a member considered worth discussing.

As detailed in a five-page document titled “NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship Principles and Procedures for Establishing the Bracket,” the first-day ballot helps the committee form an at-large nomination board listing teams in alphabetical order. So begins the internal debate that will spark its own debate, from Tobacco Road to Pauley Pavilion, early this evening.

“I know there’s this conspiracy theory that surrounds what we do, but I’ve never understood it,” Harris said. “People would not say that if they knew exactly what goes on.”

The committee spends most of the weekend narrowing the field through a series of secret ballots in which they rank eight teams at a time and assign point values. Seeding the teams, often even trickier than choosing them, follows a similar process.

“We could usually agree on the top 16 teams, but for me it was picking the seeds five through 11 that was the really hard part,” Harris said.

Harris estimated he used to watch 40 games a weekend to prepare for those types of decisions. Since December, Bowlsby and his fellow members have studied reams of information that includes the ratings percentage index and strength-of-schedule rankings of teams—guiding principles but probably not such big factors as students of bracketology believe.

Each member’s report on teams from the three or four conferences he has been assigned can carry just as much weight.

“I would base a lot of my decision, for instance, on what the guy watching the West Coast games says about them,” said Judy Rose, the athletic director at the University of Charlotte whose five-year term ended in 2004. “And you can really speak your voice why Team A is better than Team B.”

Of all the elaborate guidelines that govern the process, one trumps them all: Honesty rules.

Bound by that, one committee member famously stood up in front of the group once and said, “Folks, I know I’m not supposed to comment on our team, but I’m going to ask that you take us off the board. We’re just not good enough,” recalled NCAA spokesman Bill Hancock, a veteran observer of the process.

The pace of the meetings depends on the body clock of the chairman. Bowlsby, an early riser, planned to start watching taped games over breakfast. Past chairmen have been known to drag debates into the wee hours waiting for live West Coast results.

“It’s up to me to assess the chemistry of the group,” Bowlsby said. “And that can be the hardest thing.”

Former Kansas athletic director Bob Frederick used to clear his head with long runs. Harris would break up the monotony by moving his chair and dropping to the floor to do 50 pushups. The walks through downtown Indianapolis shared by members during breaks have produced more than a few compromises. The nightly ice cream sundaes that have become a tradition can melt layers of stress.

Rose used humor to foster that atmosphere of camaraderie when she joined. Sensing the potential for awkwardness as the newest member of the old boys’ club, Rose asked the men for their attention.

“I told them, ‘Guys, I’ve watched so much basketball on TV in the last couple of months that I think I’m starting to turn into a guy — I have control of the remote control, I’m flipping through from channel to channel and making my husband mad,’ ” Rose said. “They said, ‘Judy, that’s a sexist comment.’ I said, ‘I know.’ You need to keep a sense of humor.”

And a sense of perspective.

Harris recalled realizing how imperfect the process remains, no matter how hard the committee works, while watching Purdue play Western Carolina in the first round of the 1996 NCAA Tournament. He was on the committee that paired the No. 1-seeded Boilermakers against the 16th-seeded Catamounts, and among those on the edge of his seat as Western Carolina’s last-second shot to tie the game bounced off the rim.

“I remember saying on (the committee’s) next conference call, ‘That was not a 16 seed, guys,’ “Harris said. “I mean, they were a tipped basket away from being the first team to beat a No. 1. They had won their last six games but only had a 17-13 record. That was a good lesson. You can’t just look at a team’s record and say, ‘Let’s put a team here or there.’ “

But the teams that go nowhere except the NIT are the ones that keep committee members from sleeping soundly Selection Sunday night.

“The list of teams that get in is finite, but selecting them is really like a referee’s block-charge call,” Bowlsby said. “Somebody’s going to be unhappy either way.”