A selection committee is a group of people – usually a team of employees at a company or organization – that makes decisions about hiring new employees. The committee may be large or small, and the members of the committee have a variety of backgrounds, including education, experience and expertise in their field. A selection committee can be useful for a number of reasons, and it is recommended that an organization use one when hiring new employees.
While the Selection Committee is a group of highly respected college football ambassadors, it is important to remember that they are not professional judges. The committee is composed of 10 committee members who will spend the week before Selection Sunday putting together what feels like a 10,000-piece puzzle. Each member will evaluate, discuss, debate and review dozens of teams until the final field of 68 tournament teams is announced on Selection Sunday.
The committee’s work begins before the season even starts, as each committee member is assigned one to three conferences to monitor throughout the year. Each committee member will become a subject-matter expert on the conference and will join regular calls with the league’s top administrators to keep up-to-date on things such as scheduling conflicts, injuries or anything else that could impact a team’s performance.
Each member of the committee will watch hundreds of games this year. While computer numbers, such as the NET, are important, it is also important for committee members to see firsthand what teams look like in person and to form their own opinions. The “Eye Test” gets thrown around a lot, and it is certainly an important part of the process. However, if the committee were to make a list of criteria and rank them in order of importance, I would be surprised if the Eye Test made the cut.
After the committee watches games, it will compare teams to each other and decide whether or not a team should move up or down on the rankings. This process is known as scrubbing the seed list, and it is done multiple times throughout the week to ensure true accuracy in seeding and bracketing.
The most important thing for the committee is to make sure that each of its regions has equal strength. This can be difficult, and the committee will often make compromises to achieve this goal. In the end, the goal is that each region should have a similar number of top-four seeds.
Finally, the committee will go through a discussion and voting process to determine its bracket. This will involve a series of discussions and tally sheets as each committee member votes for the teams they believe should be in their region.