The Hoops HD Selection Committee – The Big Board

As of noon today, the Hoops HD Selection Committee is set to begin meetings later tonight now that each member of the Committee has submitted two lists to our chairman Chad Sherwood. The first list was the First Ballot that was a list of up to 24 teams (this is fewer than the 36 that we’ve typically done in past years) that each Committee member felt should be in the NCAA Tournament no matter what happens the rest of the weekend. Teams that made it in on the First Ballot were on all but 3 ballots since we have a panel of more than 10 people.

The second group of teams that were emailed to Chad was the Under Consideration list – teams that received at least 3 votes were added to the Under Consideration portion of the Board. (Regular season champions from all conferences were automatically added to the Under Consideration list as well.) This is what we came up with:

Tonight, our first task will be to nominate our Centenary and Stallings Award winners; the Centenary Award is given to the worst team in Division 1 throughout the season and will remain Under Consideration for the bulk of the proceedings. The Stallings Award is given to the worst power conference team and will also remain Under Consideration.

Second, we expect a roll call to scrub off the 15 conference champions that do not have a realistic path to at-large consideration (i.e. teams from Akron to Yale that are on the Under Consideration board). Once that is done, our main task will be to begin adding up to 12 teams to the At-Large board. For this process, each member of the Selection Committee will send a list of 8 teams to Chad for the first round of voting; the top 8 teams will be then ranked 1 through 8 and the top 4 teams will be added to the At-Large board. We will repeat this process a second time; this time the top 4 teams will join the 4 carryover teams for the second and third rounds of voting. This will put us at 36 at-large teams at the end of the night.

Also note that teams highlighted in yellow on the Under Consideration Board have completed their regular seasons and cannot add any more wins to their current tournament resumes. There are also up to seven spots highlighted in orange on the At-Large board; these are contigency teams that get added as teams can also move from the At-Large board to the Automatic Bids board as teams win their respective conference tournaments.

We will post an update at approximately midnight as the Day 1 proceeds are complete.