The Hoops HD Selection Committee – Saturday, March 15th

Tonight was our third night of meetings for our panel’s Selection Committee – the stakes continue to get higher as we get closer and closer to Selection Sunday. When we left off yesterday, we had a couple of potential contingency spots to fill on our at-large board. Colorado State was the first team to steal a bid by winning the Mountain West, but Memphis advancing to the American conference championship assures us of a potential contingency spot to open up tomorrow should the Tigers win the American conference championship. Another spot opened up with UC-San Diego winning the Big West; they will not need an at-large bid to get into the field.

Our first major order of business was to discuss in detail each of the teams remaining on the Under Consideration board; nobody was voted off the board individually. After the discussion, each member of the Committee sent a list of 4 teams to Chad for our first round of voting. The teams nominated for the first two spots were San Diego State and Vanderbilt (who joined holdovers Boise State and Xavier from the previous round of voting). Each member ranked the four teams 1 through 4; Vanderbilt and San Diego State were added to the at-large board and Xavier/Boise State both returned to the Under Consideration board since they could not carry over for 2 consecutive rounds of voting.

For our final round of voting in terms of at-large tournament teams, each committee member nominated six teams from Under Consideration and the top four teams would again be ranked 1 through 4. This time, the top four vote-getters were Indiana, Xavier, Boise State and VCU (should they not win the A-10 Championship tomorrow). In the last round of voting, Indiana was the top vote getter and received the last solid at-large bid. Xavier was the last team added to the board; they are the American contingency team and will make the field IF Memphis wins tomorrow. If UAB wins the American, the Blazers will steal the automatic bid and Xavier would be the first team out of the NCAA Tournament field. As it is right now, our top 6 teams out would be: 1) VCU, 2) Boise State, 3) North Carolina, 4) UC-Irvine (who now would need an at-large bid), 5) Texas and 6) Ohio State.

Our next task was to seed the remainder of the auto bid winners, at-large teams as well as teams that are still eligible to win their respective auto bid (i.e. George Mason, Cornell). Each member would nominate 12 teams to Chad; the top 8 vote-getters would join the previous 4 holdover teams and would then be ranked 1 through 12 as we voted on the 9-line and the 10-line. We repeated the process until we filled out the seed list with 72 teams. This is because the WAC Championship was in progress as we finished filling out the master seed list.

Here is our current selection board:

For tomorrow, our first task will likely be to do a scrub of the seed list to account for any changes in terms of seed list rankings that committee members could entertain motions on. We will also fill out two contingency brackets – the first bracket will be if Memphis wins the American (where Xavier is the last team in and VCU is the first team out should they lose in the A-10 Championship). The second bracket will be if UAB wins the American (where Indiana is the last team in and Xavier is the first team out). Stay tuned tomorrow for our final result!