The Hoops HD Selection Committee – Saturday, March 12th

Tonight was our third meeting with the Hoops HD Selection Committee – it was our longest night as we filled out the remaining at-large spots and contingency spots in our field.

We began by discussing in length each of the teams remaining Under Consideration – once we finished debate, we voted on six teams apiece (matching the spots open at the time of voting) to add to the three carryover teams (Rutgers, Texas A&M and Wyoming). The top three teams that were added were Xavier, Notre Dame and Michigan. After we ranked those teams 1 through 6, we added three teams to the field – Texas A&M, Rutgers and Michigan. This subsequently meant that a bid thief would no longer be possible in the SEC and opened up another at-large spot. Wyoming was also moved back to Under Consideration since they missed the cut on consecutive ballots.

We then repeated the process and chose 6 teams individually for the next round of balloting – the four teams selected to join Xavier and Notre Dame would be Virginia Tech (who had not won the ACC yet), Oklahoma, Wyoming and BYU. When we ranked these teams 1 through 6, Wyoming and Notre Dame finished in a tie for first. Our committee voted in Wyoming in the tiebreaking vote. This was important in that Notre Dame and Oklahoma (who finished 3rd) won the two contingency spots into the field. At the time, the First Four Out ended up being Xavier, BYU, Virginia Tech and SMU.

However, because of Virginia Tech’s ACC Championship run, we are now assured of at least one bid thief since Virginia Tech was not one of the teams we had voted in as an at-large and thus relegated Oklahoma to First Four out. This meant that our First Four Out ended up being Oklahoma, Xavier, BYU and SMU.

Our next order of business was to finish seeding the remainder of the field – we ended up seeding 71 teams in total to account for Richmond and both teams from the Big West and Ivy League who were still alive at the time the seed list was built.

Our final business for the evening was to begin scrubbing the Master Seed List – we made it through the top ten lines before finishing for the evening. When we meet tomorrow afternoon, we will finish the initial scrub and likely do one more scrub once results come in from the Ivy League, the SEC and especially the A-10 with a potential bid thief in Richmond still lurking. We will not need a contingency bracket once the A-10 game goes final. Be on rhe lookout tomorrow for our projected bracket – this will be separate from Jon Teitel’s final bracket projection where he attempts to guess the Selection Committee.