Selection committee faces week of tough choices

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Gary Walters searched for the right words – parity, compression, congestion – to explain why his NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee faces such a challenging week.

With so many teams looking so similar, whether at the top, middle or bottom of the bracket, the committee chair anticipates a trying task as he and nine other members attempt to assemble the 65-team NCAA tournament field by Sunday.

“There continues to be tremendous parity in college basketball, and that’s a wonderful thing for the game in general,” Walters said during a teleconference Wednesday from the downtown Indianapolis hotel suite where the committee will spend the next four days putting together the tournament field.

“The compression and congestion that is evident nationally and within conferences is certainly going to make selection and seeding difficult this year.”

With several top conferences playing unbalanced schedules – the Pac-10 is the only major conference where teams play each other twice – comparing teams within leagues isn’t clear cut.

Upsets in conference tournaments – say Washington winning the Pac-10 or San Diego State prevailing in the Mountain West – complicate matters for the committee. So do five conference tournament championship games Sunday, the day the committee unveils the bracket.

“Our job ultimately is to find the 34 best at-large teams,” Walters said, and then seed them and the 31 automatic qualifiers. That will take plenty of hair-splitting, starting at the top, where this year’s chase for the four No. 1 seeds is more muddled than usual.

Top-ranked Ohio State appears in good shape to land a No. 1 seed. UCLA was in the same position until Thursday’s tournament quarterfinal loss to Cal. But No. 2 Kansas, No. 3 Wisconsin, No. 6 Florida and No. 8 North Carolina need to make an impression in the next few days to grab one of the other two No. 1 seeds.

“I continue to think there is a certain amount of fluidity in those lines (No. 1 and No. 2 seeds),” said Walters, Princeton’s athletic director. “There’s less clarity. In the past, certain teams you could pretty much scratch in at this point. … This year there’s actually more doubt with where we probably are with the first and second lines.”

The picture doesn’t clear up anywhere in the bracket. Oregon coach Ernie Kent has heard projections that his 17th-ranked Ducks (23-7) could be seeded eighth, which doesn’t sit well with him.

“I know we have an excellent resume,” he said. “I think that (a No. 8 seed) is very inappropriate … that’s telling me there are 28, 27 teams in the country that are better?”

The lowest-seeded teams in the field will be scrutinized as closely as the four No. 1 seeds, Walters said. The two teams evaluated as the weakest No. 16 seeds will meet Tuesday in the play-in game in Dayton, Ohio.

Committee members – athletic directors Walters, Christopher Hill (Utah), Craig Littlepage (Virginia), Daniel Guerrero (UCLA), Eugene Smith (Ohio State), Laing Kennedy (Kent State), Stan Morrison (UC Riverside) and Thomas O’Connor (George Mason), and conference commissioners Michael Slive (Southeastern) and Jonathan Le Crone (Horizon) – vote for 34 at-large teams by secret ballot, with the first one to have been submitted Wednesday night.

Any team receiving all but two eligible votes is placed in the field. Athletic directors can’t vote for their teams, and conference commissioners can’t vote for any team in their league.

An at-large nomination board then is created, with a complicated system of nominations and voting continuing until the at-large field is filled.

The committee then seeds the teams 1 through 65, with teams moved onto seed lines four at a time, with a multitude of factors being considered.

Teams from the same conference can’t play each other until a regional final, and the top three teams in a league are placed in different regions. Teams seeded fifth or better can’t be placed at a home-court disadvantage in the first round.

Once seeding is done, teams are placed in the bracket, a process that Walters said wouldn’t begin until two hours before the pairings are announced on CBS television at 3 p.m. PDT Sunday.

Walters said the goal was to “provide a nationally balanced bracket where all four regions are equivalent and can in essence play for four national championships. That’s really what we’re striving to do.”