The Hoops HD Selection Committee – Friday Night Update

Tonight was the second night that the Hoops HD Selection Committee met via Zoom conference call to begin seeding the top of the NCAA Tournament at-large field. As of Friday evening, we had 51 teams in the field at that stage; there were 14 auto-bid winners (including Gonzaga) plus 37 at-large teams. The reason there were 37 was because we had 29 teams make the field on our first ballot plus 8 teams that were voted in on Thursday.

Keep in mind that at-large bids are guaranteed to open up in the Big 12 and the Big East; more bids will open up in the ACC with Duke and Virginia slated to meet in the ACC Championship as well as in the Pac-12 with UCLA and Arizona meeting in the Pac-12 championship.. As of the time this was written, the SEC has not opened up (although that would change if our Committee were to vote in Vanderbilt to the at-large pool). The American could open up tomorrow should Memphis and Houston meet in the conference championship game. We elected not to vote any at-large bids in tonight, nor for any contingencies that could arise. The Big Ten has Ohio State threatening to become a bid thief now that they’ve advanced to the semifinal round against Purdue. The Mountain West would open up should San Diego State win their conference tournament OR if either Utah State gets voted in as an at-large AND wins the conference tournament.

As for what we actually did, we began the process of seeding by submitting a list of our top 12 teams on the board to Chad Sherwood (NOT including teams Under Consideration). Once the process was complete, we individually ranked the Top 12 teams 1 through 12. The top eight vote-getters were added to the first 2 lines of the field; the remaining 4 teams carried over to the next round of voting. (The real NCAA Committee would submit a list of Top 8 teams and then rank the teams 1 through 8 as they add 1 line at a time to the field). After the first two lines were complete, we then again repeated the process of nominating 12 teams individually for tabulation. The top 8 teams would then be paired with the four carryover teams and would be ranked 1 through 12. The top 8 teams were added to the next set of seedlines (3 and 4). We repeated the process for the 5 and 6-lines and added only the 7-line afterwards since we did not have enough teams to add the 8-line at this time.

This is how our board looked at this stage:

On the at-large board, note the four teams in red (Arkansas, Florida Atlantic, Illinois and Iowa) are carryover teams and will be included in the next round of voting tomorrow night as we continue to build the seed list. This is NOT to be confused with the four teams highlighted in red on the Under Consideration board (Mississippi State, NC State, Providence and Rutgers); these were carryover teams for the purpose of nominating teams to the at-large board. Also note the teams in orange on the Under Consideration board; these teams have been eliminated from their respective conference tournaments and can no longer add to their profiles. Penn State and Vanderbilt are examples of teams that are still alive and can add more signature wins to their respective profiles (or an automatic bid).

Tomorrow night will be our longest night of the weekend; we will then vote in the last remaining at-large teams plus any contigency teams. We will also finish seeding the rest of the field and do an initial scrub of the seedlist to account for results through Saturday night.