The Hoops HD Selection Committee – Thursday, March 10th

The Hoops HD Selection Committee convened via Zoom conference call for the first time tonight – one of our first tasks was to name our annual Centenary and Stallings Award winners. Delaware State won their 2nd Centenary Award as the worst overall team in Division I – this was despite Carver Bible College getting a few Centenary votes. Oregon State was a unanimous choice to win the Stallings Award as the worst Power 5 team, although Georgetown did come in 2nd after finishing winless in the Big East for the first time in both the regular season and the conference tournament.

After a housekeeping motion was made to dismiss a number of UTR conference winners from the Under Consideration board (i.e. Cleveland State, Alcorn State, Towson), our main order of business tonight was to begin debating who should be added to the field as at-large teams. There were two rounds of voting that took place tonight after debate – the first vote featured everyone voting 8 teams they felt were worthy of consideration. The eight aforementioned teams were San Diego State, Creighton, Memphis, San Francisco, North Carolina, Miami, Michigan and Davidson (who beat Rutgers in a tiebreaker for the 8th spot). The second vote was to rank the teams 1 through 8; the top 4 vote-getters were added to the at-large field. Those four teams ended up being Creighton, San Diego State, North Carolina and San Francisco. Creighton’s inclusion also meant that a spot was guaranteed to open up since a bid thief was no longer possible in the Big East tournament.

Therefore, this is our current Selection Board:

The teams highlighted in red on the Under Consideration board have all completed their regular season and cannot win their respective conference tournaments. 4 teams in bold (Memphis, Miami, Michigan and Davidson) will carry over to the next round of balloting for at-large teams.

Tomorrow, our main objective will be to begin seeding the top 8 lines in the NCAA Tournament field – while the real Committee goes one line at a time, our own Committee will do 2 lines at a time as a time-saving measure. Once that is done, we may or may not add more teams into the field depending on what happens in other conference tournaments. Stay tuned tomorrow night for the next round of updates!