On Pins And Needles

If you are a college basketball fan, the next seven days are about two things: ballgames and speculation.

As the conference tournaments play out around the country, almost any game -- any upset -- will add to the questions. If Butler fails to win the Horizon League tournament, will that knock out a team from the ACC or the Big East? Does Michigan State need a win in the Big Ten tournament? What about Michigan? How many bids will the Big 12 get? And on and on.

"If you're one of those bubble teams, even if you think you're in, you're nervous," Maryland Coach Gary Williams said earlier this week. "It's nice when you go into this week only having to worry about how your team is playing, not if it will be playing next week."

This year, for the first time since 2003, Williams has no if worries. Maryland will carry a seven-game winning streak into the ACC tournament in Tampa and will simply be trying to pile up enough victories to earn a high seed. The same is true of Georgetown as it heads to New York for the Big East tournament. But George Washington, even with 20 victories, will head to Atlantic City for the Atlantic 10 tournament knowing that it probably has to win the championship to avoid the dreaded National Invitation Tournament.

"When you're in our position, you have one eye on the games and one eye on Indianapolis," GW Athletic Director Jack Kvancz. "You try to think along with the committee but I can tell you from experience, that's not an easy thing to do."

Kvancz speaks from experience having been a member of the NCAA men's basketball tournament selection committee -- aka the committee -- for five years. The machinations and decision-making of the committee have become so scrutinized in recent years that one almost expects a puff of white smoke to come out of the roof of the Indianapolis Westin Hotel when it finishes its work on Selection Sunday.

"You know when you walk out of that room that you have made someone -- more likely more than one someone -- very unhappy," said former ACC commissioner Gene Corrigan, another former committee member. "No matter how hard you try to get it right, there are going to be people who think you got it wrong."

There was no better example than last year when committee chairman Craig Littlepage was grilled by Billy Packer and Jim Nantz on CBS for taking four teams from the Missouri Valley conference and, very specifically, for taking George Mason. Three weeks later, Packer and Nantz made a point of stopping at George Mason's table at an Indianapolis restaurant to congratulate the Patriots on making the Final Four -- and to apologize for what they had said on Selection Sunday.

The performance of the Patriots and the fact that two of the four Missouri Valley teams made the Sweet 16 (the same number as the ACC in spite of lower seedings) more than proved the committee right last year. But it also raises the question about whether this year's committee, chaired by Princeton Athletic Director Gary Walters, will use that success as a reason to take more teams from the mid-majors than it did before 2006.

The official answer to that question, of course, is no -- past performance has nothing to do with selecting this year's field. In reality, there is no question that what Mason and Wichita State and Bradley and Bucknell and Northwestern State did a year ago, will have some influence on the selection process, which will begin in earnest Thursday morning.

"You sit there and you say, 'I'm not influenced by the past, I'm not influenced by a school's name or its history,' " Kvancz said. "But you're talking about 10 human beings, not 10 computers. Will they, subconsciously look at Duke a little bit different than GW? Yeah, I think so."

And, when they look at four Colonial Athletic Association teams with 20 or more victories and remember what George Mason did a year ago, it will register in their minds. Of course, so will the yammering of all the ESPN talking heads who usually hand out about 50 at-large bids (there are 34 available) before the committee begins meeting. " That you really do have to tune out," Kvancz said. "Because if you don't, you'll end up with 80 teams on the board."

Committee members talk often about how grueling the process is. They arrive Wednesday and are, for all intents and purposes, locked into the Westin until Sunday afternoon. Thirty years ago the field of (then) 25 was decided on Sunday afternoon during a conference call among the six committee members. Now picking the field is treated as if it is slightly more difficult than rocket science.

The committee has enough available information to launch a rocket. Each member is assigned two or three conferences to follow all season. There are computer printouts galore telling the members everything they could possibly want to know about a team including, no doubt, their preferred china pattern.

Still, it is all supposed to come down to one thing: who is better than who.

"That's the ultimate question," Kvancz said. "You're arguing about two teams, say Villanova versus Georgia Tech. You ask one question: neutral floor, which team would you rather not face."

That doesn't mean they always get it right. As recently as 2003, the committee somehow managed to seed Kentucky and Arizona, clearly the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the field, to meet in the semifinals. When Arizona Athletic Director Jim Livengood, that year's chairman, was asked how that could have happened he was clearly caught off-guard, since neither he nor any of the other committee members nor any of the NCAA staff had noticed the gaffe.

"Well," Livengood said somewhat desperately, "it isn't our job to anticipate matchups."

Actually, it is the committee's job to anticipate matchups. That's called seeding. Often that isn't done until late Sunday when everyone -- except the chairman who is left behind to deal with the media -- is scrambling to get to the airport. All of a sudden what has been treated as rocket science for four days becomes something a lot simpler: Can I make my plane?

That's where most of the committee members are when the field is finally unveiled -- on a plane home. "Even at 30,000 feet you can hear the screaming," Kvancz said, laughing.

There will be plenty of that to go around this year.