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With Selection Sunday roughly two weeks away, the conversation about brackets, bubbles, top seeds and all things related to the NCAA Tournament will ramp up considerably. It's fun to debate with my colleagues and with fans about the prospects of teams being one of the 34 at-large squads selected for this season's tourney. It's also fun -- informative at times -- and rather comical to listen to coaches and my fellow broadcasting brethren make cases for why teams are in or out. It's part of what we do this time of year.
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I know most of the aforementioned parties can be quite serious about why teams should or shouldn't be selected for the tournament. And the conversation, debate and guesswork leading up to the revealing of the bracket really is part of what makes the tournament so popular. But with two weeks of game action left, the weekly or daily machinations about brackets, bubbles, and top seeds, is a chasing after the wind -- a futile exercise. Quite interesting and fun, but -- unless you are a bracketologist along the lines of Joe Lunardi or Jerry Palm -- futile.
So yours truly approaches it from the "don't worry, be happy" perspective. Mine is a very rudimentary approach.
Between now and March 12, I will refrain from looking at any mock brackets, the RPI report or any nitty-gritty sheets. Granted, all are helpful and important tools in the process, but to me they are meaningless until a few days before Selection Sunday. Instead I will do my own "selection by observation" test. Here's how it works: In my job as a CBS broadcaster I will be assigned to do 12-15 college basketball games per season. In addition to that, I will attend perhaps a dozen more and watch hundreds of games on DVD or television. Through experience and observation, I can spot most NCAA Tournament teams. Just as a league MVP, national player of the year or Hall of Fame candidate has certain characteristics, qualities, and statistics, so too do tournament teams.
Keep in mind, the selection committee is only interested in selecting the 34 best at-large teams. Automatic qualifiers take care of themselves. One of my pet peeves is hearing analysts lump the at-large and automatic qualifiers together before the bracket is revealed. To me that clutters the discussion. The number of at-large teams from a conference is the relevant discussion until the bracket is revealed. However, to each their own. Back to my process.
On Feb. 25, in my personal notebook I listed 25 teams that I consider "surefire" at-large teams. These are teams I deem tournament-worthy, regardless of what happens until Selection Sunday. When the committee convenes in two weeks it will do the same thing, which is called a first ballot.
I then listed nine teams that I felt were the next-most worthy of at-large selections. That got me to 34 at-large teams. Easy, unscientific, simple and quite subjective. And halfway home in my process.
Upon further review of my 34 at-large selections, I realized that 13, perhaps 14 conferences are represented. That means that if a team from one of these conferences becomes an automatic qualifier (AQ), it would be removed from the at-large board, which would create a spot for another team. So theoretically, 13-14 at-large spots could become available. The likelihood of that happening is remote. There are usually a few surprise conference tournament winners. So for the sake of simplicity (and sanity), I have assumed that 10 at-large spots will become available when the dust from postseason conference tournament clears. So where will those 10 teams come from? My stoop list. On Feb. 25 my stoop list was at 25 teams. These are the teams in my mind that have the most to prove or lose over the next two weeks. And in the next two weeks this list will be whittled down considerably by what takes place on the court. I'll be watching all of these teams closely, looking for some easily identifiable differentiation. By March 10, I anticipate that my stoop list will be down to around 15 teams. At that point, I'll do my final "selection by observation" test. Only after that will I feel the need and urge to start crunching numbers in preparation for my animated debates with Seth Davis about top seeds and stoop teams throughout Selection Sunday weekend.
I haven't listed specific teams in describing my personal process, because -- you guessed it -- it's futile, a chasing after the wind. LOL. But in my March 14 column, in preparation for Selection Sunday, I promise to name names.
