The Notorious Nine arrived in Kansas City on Thursday, and at 7:30 in the evening they gathered for an informal dinner. At its finish they rode the elevator to their floor, one of those Hyatt floors reached only with a special key, and they scattered for their final nights of sleep before beginning their controversial task.
That floor was reserved for The Nine, members of the Division I Men`s Basketball Committee, and from that moment until late Sunday afternoon only they and their NCAA liaisons will be permitted on it. They will receive messages but (with rare exception) no direct phone calls; will subsist primarily on room -ervice meals; and-until they anoint the 64 teams for college basketball`s Big Dance-will remain wrapped in a cocoon to protect them from the blandishments of prospective lobbyists.
At 7:30 this Friday morning, they will gather again, this time in the suite that will be used for relaxation. Then, breakfast completed, they will walk across the hall to a conference room, and there begin analyzing the encyclopedic research that has been assembled for them. ”Everything in the public domain plus the RPI (the NCAA`s private Ratings Percentage Index),”
says committee chair and Big 10 Commissioner Jim Delany.
Three Fridays ago, in a Chicago hotel room, The Nine met and reviewed the procedures they will follow, and each was given a blank bracket sheet and instructed to practice on it. So here, in the early hours of the selection process, all promises to go smoothly, for here they first select 34 teams for the available at-large slots.
They know, most certainly, that many of those teams will qualify for one of the 30 automatic bids extended to conference champions, but, as they cast their ballots, that is not yet a concern. It is also not hard to reach a consensus on some 20 to 25 of those teams, and their difficulties will not begin until those automatic slots start filling up and the final
(approximately) 10 schools must be selected.
Sometime around noon on Friday, they will break for lunch, return to their suite, and there feast on a meal usually ordered by Dave Cawood. He is an assistant executive director of the NCAA and one of The Nine`s liasons, and his culinary inclinations are storied. ”You always gain five pounds over that weekend,” says Atlantic Coast Conference Commissioner Gene Corrigan, a past member.
”Yes, the committee has a slight propensity for ice cream,” agrees Vanderbilt Athletic Director Roy Kramer, a current member. ”It`s not all bad. There are worse propensities to have. But it`s not one of your healthy weekends.”
As Friday afternoon passes and the true weekend approaches, The Nine will reach that point where there is no longer a consensus, and now they must begin using their research in their quest for the final invitees. Here they analyze not only those familiar rankings and ratings, but also the recommendations of their coaches` advisory boards and the esoterica they have accumulated.
Conference affiliations are no longer important, for after its automatic qualifier is determined, the rest of its teams are thrown into an at-large pool and judged against the nation`s remaining teams. Nor is there a magic number limiting how many can be invited from a conference, for some of them are quite obviously worthy of more representation than others. No. What is important are those facts and figures The Nine themselves have pulled together.
What is a team`s record at home, and away? What is a team`s record against Top 50 opponents, Top 100 opponents, Top 150 opponents? Is a team better now than it was in December, or is it ending its season floundering?
”A team`s history can be put together quickly by nine different people spouting nine pieces of information,” says Delany.
Is any of it more important than the rest?
”Bad losses,” he says. ”Bad losses by our criteria are considered to be losses to teams outside the Top 150. That`s a devastating loss. But the road (record) is the best. The road is a beast in the pro game, where only two teams have .500 records. The road is a beast in the college game. If, in a math test, you want to separate the great student from the good student, you give a hard test. That`s what the road does. If a team`s gone out, played five Top 50 teams and won two, that tells you a lot.”
By 6 p.m. on Friday, when The Nine break again, they will have (or will be close to having) all 64 slots filled, and that evening they will sit down to watch the evening`s conference tournament games. Sometimes they do it at the home of NCAA Associate Executive Director Tom Jernstedt, where ribs are consumed and attention is divided among four television sets. Sometimes they do it back in their suite, where the routine is the same.
But no matter the site, says Kramer, ”That is one of our more relaxing times. Saturday night is the difficult night. Everyone just looks at the selections, but seeding can be as difficult.”
That seeding usually begins early on Saturday, and The Nine start by stringing their top four teams across a board. Then they continue on, No. 5 five under No. 1, No. 6 under No. 2, until all 64 teams are in place. Now comes the juggling, for again they have guidelines to follow. Balancing the four regions is the most obvious need. Another is don`t, in any region, replay the championship game of a conference tourney. A third is don`t place the top teams from any conference in the same region.
By late Saturday afternoon, with conference tourneys still floating around them, they usually reach a point where they can go no further. If those tourneys have all gone according to form, the decisions that yet await them will be easier. But if upsets have occurred, if some regular-season also-ran is now positioned to win a tourney, the pressure on them will be immeasurably higher.
Keeping track of how many slots they have to fill is a problem facing the committee as Sunday`s tourney finals unfold, and as the available slots decrease, the pressure increases.
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”It`s just like when people take tests and cluster around a certain grade. We end up having teams cluster around a certain point,” says Delany.
”It could be nine teams competing for the final four spots. It could be six teams competing for the final two. We`ve had teams in, and then tournaments have produced unexpected winners and all of a sudden there aren`t spots there for teams we felt were 32, 33, 34. It just depends on the upsets, and where the cluster is.”
”A lot of debate goes on then, and there are always going to be differences,” says Kramer. ”We don`t set ourselves up on pedestals, but I don`t think there`s a team in the country that doesn`t get fair
consideration.”
”But when it`s not clear, it`s very difficult,” says Corrigan. ”I`ve sweated through those times, and the last half-dozen are always the toughest. There`s a lot of strain over those.”
To ease some of that strain, the NCAA negotiated hard with CBS, and got the network to push back its selection show an hour, until all conference tourney games have been completed. That, it hopes, will give The Nine enough time to consider their handiwork before presenting it to a waiting world.
”It`s a very, very complicated process,” Delany says. ”But it`s very open, very candid, and the beauty of the committee is the juxtaposition of strong individual opinions and consensus. I think there`s a lot of cynicism
(about the process) that grows out of the American psyche, but I can tell you this:
”No one smokes, so it`s not done in some smoke-filled room.”