Sowing the seeds we love: HoopsHD interviews NCAA Selection Committee member Tom Wistrcill

For those of you who cannot wait until Selection Sunday to find out what the Selection Committee is thinking, the top-16 teams will be revealed in a sneak preview later this month. This is not a crystal ball showing exactly which schools will become protected seeds on March 15th…although 3 of the #1 seeds from last year’s preview DID end up as #1 seeds last Selection Sunday (Auburn/Duke/Florida). Rather, it served as a peek behind the curtain at what the committee was thinking and what criteria they were using in their analysis of everyone’s body of work. Earlier today HoopsHD’s Jon Teitel got to chat with Selection Committee member Tom Wistrcill about NET, NIL, WAB, etc.

You were captain of your D-3 college basketball team at St. Mary’s University, and 1 summer you played against a guy who scored 34 PTS against you…in the 2nd half: could you tell at the time that Tony Bennett understood the game well enough to eventually win the 2019 NCAA title as coach at Virginia?! Tony was held in high regard in the Wisconsin high school ranks in the 1980s so the expectations were very high for him. We were roughly the same height and build and in the 1st half he did not do much scoring, but in the 2nd half he acted like I was not even there. I remember coming to the bench during timeouts and asking if anyone else wanted to guard him…but every one of my teammates said no! Every athlete realizes at some point that they are not at the top of the food chain, and that was my point.

From 2002-2006, you were General Manager in charge of Badger Sports Properties representing the Wisconsin athletics department, where you advocated for the NCAA to allow student-athletes to get NIL money: what was your reaction when NIL became a reality, and do you like where things are at or do you think things are a bit out of control? NIL is something that was always coming: it just took a long time to get there because the can kept getting kicked down the road. Instead of doing it on our own, we were forced to do it by the courts, which is why we now have a tough situation. I am glad that student-athletes are getting the money that they deserve, but right now there do not seem to be any rules enforceable around it. You cannot legislate ethics, which also makes it hard due to some bad actors.

It was reported this week that the SEC will distribute more than $1 billion to its 16 universities for the 2024-25 fiscal year: as the commissioner of a non-power-conference (Big Sky), are you concerned that the gap between the haves and the have-nots has grown too large? Not yet. The gap has always been so big: when you are underwater it does not matter whether you are 2” from the surface or 10’ from the surface. Commissioner Greg Sankey has done a great job in the SEC, and we are all trying to provide more resources for our schools/athletes. I am just happy being on the ship…even if I am not the biggest captain on the deck!

How many hours/day will you work on selection stuff this month, and do you have any advice on how to keep your fellow committee members from losing their sanity on Selection Sunday? This is my 4th year on the committee, and it has been an incredible experience. Now that I know what I am looking for I have become more efficient. I spend a lot of time watching the bubble teams: there are probably 16-18 right now and I want to see their top-end play. We only have 1 new committee member this year in John Wildhack from Syracuse, who has been a great addition. We have a great group that cares deeply about athletics and challenges each other at the right times.

What kind of games have the biggest impact on a team’s seed (big road win/bad home loss/other), and why are they more important than other games? Every game from November to March matters and every committee member looks at things through their own lens. I feel that your game must be able to travel because there are no home games in the NCAA tourney, so I want to see how you did against good competition in road/neutral games. Home games are also important, but I am always interested in seeing if you can defend at a high level on the road in an angry environment.

Committee members get to see many modern rankings on the official team sheets (such as BPI/KPI/KenPom) in addition to the traditional ones: how have you made use of these advanced metrics, and do you have a favorite 1? NET is very important and the 1 we talk about the most and spend the most time on. WAB (Wins Above Bubble) has helped us separate teams from a selection perspective, so we spend a lot of time talking about that as well and it keeps percolating to the top. We think WAB is a good differentiator that helps us dig into a team sheet. You need the complete resume to try to separate Team A from Team B, in terms of both which 1 is getting in and what kind of seed they will get.

You mentioned WAB, which quantifies how many wins a team has compared to a bubble team’s projected record against the same opponents: if Gonzaga was an 8 seed last year with a NET of 8 and a WAB of 35, then is it safe to assume that WAB is a much better indicator of a team’s seed then NET is? No: individually you can come up with narratives that fit a lot of different metrics. NET can get compressed at the “bubble line” (in the high-40s/low-50s range), while WAB gives us a greater separator among the bubble teams. That is the 1st very important decision that we will agonize over on Saturday night, so we need as much data/discussion as possible. Seeding discussions on Sunday morning are also important because matchups matter in the NCAA tourney. Every year is different: I cannot predict right now which metrics will matter the most, and I will not know until I am in the committee room spending 3 hours discussing 5 teams for 3 spots or 8 teams for 4 spots or however it gets sorted out. You simply cannot predict how the rest of the season will go.

I know that injuries can play a role on the inclusion/seeding of a team, but how do you treat the addition of a player in the middle of a season (for example, if Alabama added Charles Bediako to its roster in mid-January, then do you put an asterisk next to the 5 games that it lost before he arrived)? We have talked about mid-season additions and will treat them a little like injuries. As a team moves into the conference tourney, we will see whether their new player is available. We will not penalize/reward anyone for that: just see how the team played with/without him. We feel it is the best way to do it with this unique roster movement situation.

While you try to split up teams from the same conference into different regions, what happens if the Big 10 and/or Big 12 end up with 6 of the top-20 teams in the nation? We have a set of parameters that we must follow as best we can. There might be some unique circumstances, but we will try to follow those principles to try to make it work. We almost had 2 teams from the same conference play in the 2nd round last March, but 1 of them ended up losing in the 1st round so it did not happen. We will follow our bracketing procedures as closely as we can…but a lot of the procedures were not originally set up for a world with large conferences that have 10 teams get in.

Do you think that 68 is the right # of teams, or would you prefer to have a larger or smaller field? It is an ongoing discussion at every meeting and there are pros/cons to moving up or down. We are being very deliberate about it because this is the crown jewel of college athletics and we take our roles very seriously. I do not have a strong feeling 1 way or the other, but (luckily) we do not need to make that decision today.