The Hoops HD Committee Report: Saturday, March 11

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Saturday marked the 3rd night of the Hoops HD Selection Committee meetings – tonight we filled the final at-large spots. Once the final at-large spots were filled, the remainder of the field was seeded into the Master Seed List and the committee did a thorough scrubbing of the seed list to account for all games played through Saturday.

Two spots initially opened up based on Kentucky, SMU and Cincinnati winning their games and opening up at-large spots out of the SEC and American conferences. After debating the final teams listed Under Consideration, there was also an A-10 contingency to account for because of VCU and Rhode Island’s matchup in the A-10 title game tomorrow. Our committee was in a position to choose 3 teams out of a pool of 8 teams to consider. What made things real interesting here was Middle Tennessee was voted into the field as an at-large – the initial 3 teams voted into the field were Kansas State, USC and Middle Tennessee. This also meant that we now had a contingency team from Conference USA to consider! Rhode Island became the final at-large contingency team regardless of whether or not they are able to beat VCU in the A-10 Championship tomorrow. Later on in the evening, Middle Tennessee did beat Marshall to lock up the automatic bid out of Conference USA. At the end of the day, this means that VCU, Kansas State and Rhode Island are the last three teams to be voted into the field.

The next phase was to finish filling the master seed list with all the at-large teams along with teams playing in their conference championship games (i.e. Bakersfield, New Mexico State, New Orleans, Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, Troy, Texas State, Princeton, Yale, UC-Irvine and UC-Davis). Bakersfield, Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and UC-Irvine were ultimately removed from the seed list after losing in their conference championship games. At the end of the night, we had 70 teams in our Master Seed List. That number will shrink to 68 teams once the Ivy and Sun Belt championship games are played.

The 3rd and most laborious task of the night was to scrub the entire seed list. This is the process where teams were shifted up and down to account for games played through Saturday. Motions to move teams require a simple majority yes-or-no vote to be approved. Below is the updated selection board:

Tomorrow will be the final day of the Hoops HD Selection Committee meetings. Look for our final bracket projection on the website sometime after the Atlantic 10, Ivy League, SEC and Sun Belt conference championship games go final. It is not expected that multiple contingency brackets will be needed this year, but stay tuned to find out!

Below is the above seed list placed into a bracketed format.  As the article indicates above, this is not our final bracket