Sowing the seeds we love: HoopsHD interviews Selection Committee chairman and Kentucky Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart

We are just over 2 weeks from Selection Sunday, which means that the 10-member NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee is working hard to place 68 of the best teams in the nation into a tidy little bracket. The Committee revealed its top-16 teams in a bracket preview earlier this month: while it was just a snapshot, the #1 seeds at the time (Gonzaga/Baylor/Michigan/Ohio State) could very well become the #1 seeds next month. It served as a peek behind the curtain to see what the Committee was thinking and what criteria they value during their analysis of each team’s body of work. HoopsHD’s Jon Teitel got to chat with Selection Committee chairman Mitch Barnhart about doing his job during a pandemic and having the entire tourney in Indianapolis.

What is the biggest challenge that COVID has posed for the Selection Committee either on or off the court, and what steps are you taking to solve them? Our priority in dealing with Covid-19 is to do everything in our power to keep student-athletes, coaches, and staffs healthy so that we can play the tournament. There are many operational components to bringing 68 teams into one site but at the end of the day the goal is to select the best 68 and have a chance to hand someone the trophy on Championship Monday.

How many hours/day will you be working on selection stuff this month, and do you have any advice to keep your fellow committee members from losing their sanity on Selection Sunday? There is significant commitment on the part of the committee members. Not only do they have their committee work but their full-time jobs as well. It is an incredible honor to prepare, select, seed, and bracket for one of the great sporting events in the world. No different than how a team practices for game day, the preparation by this group throughout the week allows you to make quality decisions on Sunday.

How do you feel about the entire tourney being held in Indianapolis this spring, and has that made your life easier or harder? Dan Gavitt and the NCAA staff have done a Herculean job in reinventing this tournament for this year. The amount of detail and logistics are at a level that is hard to comprehend. Once we get all the teams in Indianapolis it will be exciting and provide the chance to crown a champion. Having all 68 teams in Indianapolis does take away the logistics of traveling within the tournament but certainly has added a lot of details and protocols because of the Covid environment.

Which primary conferences are you assigned to this year, and how much weight do you give to input from the representatives of those conferences? As the chair, I am not responsible for specific conferences this year as I have been in the past.

What are the major categories that you feel have the biggest impact on a team’s seed (big road win, bad home loss, other), and why do you value them more than other categories? The foundation of all resumes begins with — who did you play, where did you play them, and the result. Assessing the number of quality wins as it relates to the number of quality opportunities is also an important part of the resume. Obviously, having metrics as a part of a toolbox is important Every committee member looks at teams through different lenses and that is what brings balance and great conversation to the discussions about each team.

Committee members are able to see many different kinds of rankings on the official team sheets (such as BPI/KPI/KenPom) in addition to the traditional ones: how have you made use of these advanced metrics, and do you have a favorite 1? I go back to the foundation of who did you play, where did you play them, and what was the result. I do not have a favorite metric but do like to look at the entire body of work.

If a team wants to make the NCAA tourney, are they better off scheduling decent teams who they think they can beat, or great teams who they can only hope to upset, or a nice mix of both, or other? Scheduling is a local decision and each program must assess as it relates to their roster, their conference, their tradition and expectations. Generally, you will find teams with a balance in their scheduling.

To be even more specific, if a team did not schedule a lot of “guarantee games” this year with mid-major teams and has a lot of Tier 1 wins but only a .500 overall record because they play in a tough conference, should they be penalized for not having a bunch of Tier 4 wins that would have otherwise pumped up their win column? Scheduling was very difficult this year for many schools. There will be teams with more games available and others with fewer and we will have to evaluate each resume as it lies. Everyone made a significant attempt to put together a quality schedule and to that end we will try to find the best 37 at-large teams to complete the bracket.

Many of your former coaches/administrators have become athletic directors at other universities including Greg Byrne (Alabama)/Mark Coyle (Minnesota)/Rob Mullens (Oregon)/Scott Stricklin (Florida)/John Cohen (Mississippi State)/Kevin Saal (Murray State)/DeWayne Peevy (DePaul): how proud are you of your “administrative tree”? I am certainly proud of each of these incredible administrators. As my career developed, I was fortunate to have been given increasing responsibility to make it possible for me to become an AD. My goal has been to equip people to launch them toward the goals they have set for themselves.

Your Wildcats had an uncharacteristic 5-13 start this season due to a variety of factors (including the combination of having 1 of the youngest rosters AND 1 of the hardest schedules in the nation) but have won 3 in a row: is Big Blue Nation close to pushing the panic button or is everyone just taking a breath because they know that John Calipari is a Hall of Fame coach? As you stated, there have been a variety of factors. The piece that was so good for us in years past has been the ability to gather our team, get to know each other during the summer training – such as our trips to play games in the Bahamas or Canada, or something else – and play all of the early-season games that lead into our conference schedule: that did not exist this year. It really impacted, and delayed, our team’s ability to come together and play together, but now you have seen our team improve significantly during the past couple of weeks.

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