The Hoops HD Selection Committee – Friday, March 14th

Tonight was the second night of our Hoops HD Selection Committee – we had two main tasks that we carried out during tonight’s meetings. The first thing we did was more of a housecleaning maneuver; SMU was voted off of the Under Consideration board after their loss in the ACC Tournament on Thursday. After this, we added more teams to consider for addition to the at-large board (along with carryovers Arkansas, Indiana and Vanderbilt). Each member of the Committee nominated eight teams; the top five vote getters would be added for consideration. In this round, Boise State, UC-San Diego, West Virginia and Xavier were nominated; Oklahoma beat out San Diego State in a tiebreaker for the fifth spot.

The next step was to rank those teams one through eight; the four teams added to the board were Arkansas, West Virginia, UC-San Diego and Oklahoma. Xavier and Boise State move on to the next round of at-large voting; Indiana and Vanderbilt returned to Under Consideration since they could not carry over in consecutive rounds of voting. This also means that a potential contingency spot could open up if UC-San Diego wins the Big West championship tomorrow night.

After this, the bulk of tonight’s work was adding the top eight lines to the Master Seed List. Each member of the Committee nominated twelve teams for consideration; the top 12 vote-getters would be ranked 1 through 12. (The real committee would nominate 8 teams and then rank them 1 through 8 as they go one seed line at a time, but we go 2 lines at a time to save time in the process.) Our 1-line included Auburn, Duke, Houston and Florida; our 2-line included Alabama, Tennessee, Michigan State and St. John’s.

We repeated this process three more times as we built the top 32 places for the Master Seed List. Below is where we finished the night:

Also note the 5 spots in orange at the at-large board: these are spots that are guaranteed to open up as the Big 12, B1G, Big East, SEC and ACC will not have bid thieves this year. The Mountain West (with Boise State in the championship game), American and A-10 could still have bids stolen depending on what happens this weekend (although you will note that we have not added VCU to our field).

Tomorrow night, we will fill up the remaining at-large spots and contingency spots and then we will finish building the master seed list. It will include more than 68 teams since not all the conference championships will have gone final until Sunday. After the Master Seed list is complete, we will do an initial scrub of the Master Seed list. Tune in tomorrow/early Sunday morning for the next update!