|
 |   |
|
EVENTS Fantasy Central Inside Game Multimedia Central Statitudes Your Turn Message Boards Email Newsletters Golf Guide Cities Work in Sports
CNNSI.com GROUP
COMMERCE |  |
Take your pick It should be easy, but Selection Sunday never is
Posted: Tuesday March 07, 2000 06:00 PM
This is not trigonometry, for goodness sakes, or at least it shouldn't be. This is not trying to figure out what in the heck Dennis Green is thinking up there in Minnesota. This is not like searching for a presidential candidate with personality. Picking the teams who will play in the NCAA men's basketball tournament, the Big Dance, March Madness, the Field of 64, the Big Show -- let's go ahead and get all these out of the way now, shall we? -- should be relatively easy. Truth be told, it's probably much easier and much more formulaic than many people care to believe. Still, as the people on the tournament selection committee will tell you, this whole process is hardly easy. There are no cut-and-dried rules. It's not, as you'll hear Sunday night when the teams are announced, an "exact science." Opinions come into play. Maybe politics, too. Some teams, maybe even some deserving ones, will be left out. And, so, comes the inevitable hurt. "That feeling comes back every time this time of year," says Riley Wallace, in his 13th year of coaching the Hawaii men's team. Hawaii has made it to the NCAA Tournament once in Wallace's tenure, and missed out two years ago despite a 21-win season. "If you get your hopes up, you'll be disappointed." The selection committee this year is made up of a bunch of people you probably never heard of. Craig Thompson, the commissioner of the Mountain West Conference, is the man in charge. There are a few athletic directors from all over the place, from North Carolina State to Santa Clara, and a couple other commissioners. When Thompson and the nine other members of the committee hole up in an Indianapolis hotel this weekend, probably starting Wednesday night, they'll be trying to pick the 35 at-large teams in the tournament. The other 29 are automatic bids that go to conference winners or conference tournament winners. The committee will hunker down in its meeting rooms with the latest Ratings Percentage Index. The members will pore over strength of schedule numbers. They'll have lists of what they consider "quality wins" and printouts showing how the teams on the so-called "bubble" have done in the last few weeks of the season. They'll look at every loss and every win of the teams that have a chance. Injuries may come into play. There will be some debate. There always is. But when it comes down to picking time, most of the 35 shake out pretty cleanly. You can always see the reasoning, even if you don't agree with it. "They always have an answer when they come out. And I think they work on that," says Wallace, whose team (16-10 entering the Western Athletic Conference tournament) has no shot at the tournament this season. "It's almost like they are programmed to have the right answer." Schools have tried to talk their way into the tournament, to politic their way past the formulas and the indexes and the printouts. Hawaii sent fax after fax when the Rainbows went 21-9 in 1997-98. The Rainbows went to the NIT instead. It hurts Wallace, still, two years later. "The committee, over the years, has really developed an outstanding way, with the different constraints they have, to do a very good, thorough job," says C.M. Newton, the Kentucky athletics director who served seven years on the committee, including two as chair. "But the only sure way in is to be one of those 29 [conference] winners." In fact, even before all the automatic bids are in, the committee usually has figured out who's in or who's out, depending on how those last few games go. The vast majority of those 35 are likely to come from about a half a dozen or so big name conferences. You know, the Atlantic Coast, Southeastern, Pac-10, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12 … the usual suspects. They are teams that rank high in the RPI, have some quality wins, played a tough schedule yet still couldn't secure an automatic bid. When all those are figured in, you usually have a few other spots. Some of them also go to teams from big-name conferences. Often, a strong conference gets an unexpected bid -- a record-tying seven made it from the Big Ten last season. Then the committee goes to the second-tier conferences -- the Atlantic-10, Conference-USA and the like. The 35 fill up quickly. In the end, two or three 20-win teams may be left out. Like Hawaii the one season, like Xavier and Mississippi State and Fresno State last season. They are almost always from conferences considered "lower tier" by most experts. "I always feel for the guy on the bubble," Wallace says. When you boil it all down, when you throw all the numbers around and look at all the information, it seems relatively easy to figure out who gets to play. It's never easy, though, to figure out who gets left out. Or, as Wallace knows, to be left out. John Donovan is senior writer for CNNSI.com. Comments? To e-mail Donovan, click here.
| ||||||||||||||||
