In a room filled with college athletic directors, coaches and former players, twelve people make decisions that shape March Madness in a meticulous process that would send most people running for the exit. These aren’t professional judges, but college sports ambassadors who spend the week before Selection Sunday putting together what feels like a 10,000-piece puzzle. They evaluate, discuss, debate and review dozens of teams until the final field of 68 tournament teams is announced on Selection Sunday.
It starts with the monitors, who are assigned conferences to watch throughout the season and attend monthly conference calls to keep up with injuries, statistics, chemistry and anything else that could impact a team’s performance. The monitors then pass their findings to the full committee, who considers those factors along with a myriad of other data and rankings when it comes time to create a bracket.
The committee uses a color-coded spreadsheet that immediately determines whether a school’s site or region is already spoken for, and a number of rules prevent schools from playing each other in their home cities more than once or on neutral sites. The committee also must consider each school’s distance from each of the potential locations and which ones may need charter flights.
Once the committee has decided on a set of rankings, they begin to build the bracket, starting with the top eight seeds. They then move on to the next seed, and so on until they’ve placed every team in its proper slot, with the exception of the lone No. 1 seed, which the committee reserves for a special game to kick off the tournament.
Then it’s a matter of scrubbing the list, going line by line to make sure no one has been given a lower seed than they deserve or that someone has been bumped up too high from their true seed. The committee also tries to avoid rematches of schools that played each other in the regular season, while keeping in mind rules that prevent teams from the same conference from playing at the same site an inordinate amount of times.
There’s a lot to consider, and despite 12 votes, it’s impossible for everyone in the room to agree on everything. That’s why it’s good to have a variety of different opinions on a committee, and why it’s important that those opinions are respected.
Selection committees are used in a wide variety of situations, from choosing board members to finding new hires. But regardless of the industry or type of committee, there are certain things that are essential to successful selection committees.