The Hoops HD Selection Committee – Saturday, March 16th

NOTE: At the time this article was posted, the WAC Championship between Grand Canyon and Texas-Arlington was still in progress; hence both teams being placed on the master seed list. This list has since been updated to reflect Grand Canyon winning this game.

As for tonight, our first order of business was to finish adding teams to our at-large board. We had the Big 10 open up a spot by virtue of Illinois and Nebraska advancing to the title game; we also had the SEC open up thanks to Auburn and Florida advancing to their title game. At this point in time, we prepared to add two teams to the at-large column. Each committee member voted for their top six teams still Under Consideration (except carryover teams Texas A&M and Oklahoma). In this round of voting, Michigan State, Virginia, Colorado and Indiana State were added to the nomination board. These teams were ranked 1 through 6 by each committee member; the two teams added to the board were Michigan State and Texas A&M. Virginia, Colorado and Indiana State were carryovers; Oklahoma was booted back to the Under Consideration board after missing the cut on back-to-back ballots.

We repeated the same process for adding two more contingency teams; these spots would open up depending on how the ACC and Pac-12 conference tournaments played out. This time, Oklahoma, Providence and Grand Canyon (assuming they needed an at-large) were added to the nomination board with the three carryover teams. In the final round of voting, Colorado and Indiana State were named as the contingency teams.

At this point, we went back to the task of building the remaining master seed list. We had seeded up to 76 teams on our master seed list because we had potential bid thieves like VCU, Duquesne, UAB and Temple that needed to be placed on the seed list. Just as we were finishing the master seed list, there were two monster upsets that made the contingency picks of Colorado and Indiana State meaningless; NC State pulled off the amazing feat of winning 5 games in 5 days to win the ACC Championship and Oregon also stole the automatic bid in the last-ever Pac-12 Championship!

Our final task was to do an initial scrub of the master seed list; each committee member could make motions to move teams up and down the seed list as necessary. At the time this article was written, the list was reduced to 72 teams; this will go down to 71 after the WAC Championship goes final. Our last four teams in the at-large field ended up being St. John’s, Florida Atlantic, Texas A&M and Seton Hall. Our first four teams out were Colorado, Indiana State, Virginia and Oklahoma.

Tomorrow will be the final day of our Selection Committee meetings; we will do one final scrub of the master seed list and potentially entertain motions to move teams off of the at-large board and revote a team (or teams) into the field. There will likely be two brackets that will be made based on the championship game in the American – one bracket will feature UAB as the auto-bid winner and the other bracket will feature Temple as the auto-bid winner. Come back tomorrow afternoon and see what our final bracket (or brackets) will be at that time!