The 2019 NCAA Tournament begins on Tuesday, March 19, and the fate of college basketball teams across the country rests in the hands of the tournament selection committee. It’s a 10-person committee that meets a few times during the season, including before Selection Sunday.
Who is on the NCAA Tournament selection committee?
The committee is made up entirely of either athletic directors or conference commissioners.
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So, who makes up this all-important committee?
The committee chairman is Bernard Muir director of athletics at Stanford University. Muir began service on the committee Sept. 1, 2014, and is serving as chair of the committee for 2018-19.The committee is made up entirely of either athletic directors or conference commissioners:
- Mitch Barnhart, Kentucky AD
- Tom Burnett, Southland Conference commissioner
- Janet Cone, UNC Asheville AD
- Bernadette McGlade, Atlantic 10 Conference commissioner
- Michael O’Brien, Toledo vice president and AD
- Jim Phillips, Northwestern University vice president for athletics and recreation
- Chris Reynolds, Bradley University vice president for intercollegiate athletics
- Craig Thompson, Mountain West Conference commissioner
- Kevin White, Duke AD
Here’s a bit more about the makeup of the committee, from the NCAA:
The 10-member NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Committee is responsible for selecting, seeding and bracketing the field for the NCAA Tournament. School and conference administrators are nominated by their conference, serve five-year terms and represent a cross-section of the Division I membership.
Committee members spend countless hours evaluating teams during the regular season. They are expected to be experts on the teams within their assigned conferences while maintaining a broad-based knowledge of Division I basketball.
How often do they meet?
The committee convenes in November each year to discuss the upcoming season, and then again in mid-February for a March Madness bracket preview show. The committee has done this for two years now — it projects the top 16 seeds, including the top-four teams in each region. Then in March, the committee meets again to decide the final field of 68 for Selection Sunday.
What do they do?
There are 32 teams that reach the NCAA tournament via an automatic bid by winning their conference tournament. It’s the Selection Committee’s job to choose the other 36 at-large teams and put together everything on the bracket.
What’s the Selection Committee looking for? Quality wins, with extra value given toward winning on the road. Instead of teams being grouped solely by RPI, as in the past, the Selection Committee’s team sheets now classify wins into four groups that account for location:
Quadrant 1: games at home vs teams ranked 1-30 in the RPI, neutral vs 1-50, road vs 1-75
Quadrant 2: home vs 31-75, neutral vs 51-100, road vs 76-135
Quadrant 3: home vs 76-160, neutral vs 101-200, road vs 136-240
Quadrant 4: home vs 161-plus, neutral vs 201-plus, Road vs 241-plus
The Selection Sunday show can be watched at 6 p.m. ET on CBS.
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