By John Feinstein
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, March 17, 2008 2:43 PM

The biggest question on Selection Sunday, once we have waded through all of CBS's, "corporate champions," and the commercials and the analysis of the four No. 1 seeds -- "the committee did an excellent job," (for the record, my cat could have picked the four No. 1's this year) -- and the 65-team bracket is finally unveiled, is where to begin.

For entertainment value let's start with Virginia Tech Coach Seth Greenberg who declared on Saturday that the committee would have to be, "certifiably insane," to leave his team out of the field. Let us then go to the flip side of that analysis and bring in CBS's Clark Kellogg, who on Sunday insisted that to criticize the committee would be, "stupid."

As usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The 10 members of the basketball committee are not certifiably insane. Those of us who criticize them are not stupid.

Virginia Tech should have made the field. So should Virginia Commonwealth, which was no doubt left out because it lost to William & Mary in the tournament when a kid named Laimis Kiselius, staring at the end of his college career, played the game of his life.

Maybe if committee chairman Tom O'Connor had been at that game instead of being interviewed that day by CBS for the 100th time, he might have encouraged his colleagues to watch it on tape rather than just look at William & Mary's RPI. Apparently that didn't happen because VCU was a better team than Baylor for sure and at least as deserving as Arizona, which played a very tough schedule but went 9-11 in its own conference, 6-11 if you take out three wins over an Oregon State team that was 0-19 in Pac-10 play and may have been worse than its record indicated.

Interestingly, neither Virginia Tech nor VCU would have made the field if Georgia had not won the SEC tournament. The team the Bulldogs knocked off the board was Syracuse -- perhaps the committee was trying to pay Jim Boeheim back for leaving him out last year.

There were other schools that could complain at least mildly: Arizona State beat Arizona twice, finished ahead of the Wildcats in the conference (9-9) but was done in by a horrific non-conference schedule. There is no sympathy here for power conference schools that buy wins. The committee deserves credit for doing the same thing. Illinois State also had reason to complain -- it could have gotten in ahead of Oregon or Villanova. The Wildcats were deserving and there's no real argument here with their inclusion but the world would have continued to spin on its axis without eight Big East teams.

Overall, the committee did pretty well with selection this year; far better than last year when everyone caved to pressure from the big conferences after the Missouri Valley had gotten as many bids as the ACC in 2006 and the power commissioners had a fit. This year was not as good as 2006 but better than last year.

The real issue was seeding. Oklahoma gets a No. 6 seed and Butler a No. 7? Wrong. Gonzaga and Davidson (a No. 10) should not have to play each other in the first round with the winner getting Georgetown, while Marquette and Kentucky -- middling power conference teams -- get to play each other with the winner getting Stanford.

Gonzaga plays the toughest non-conference road schedule in the country every year because almost no one will play the 'Zags on their home court. The committee should reward that. Butler has a similar problem and was 29-3. In return for that it plays a good (26-6) South Alabama team and, if it survives that game, gets Tennessee in the second round. Vanderbilt is a No. 4 seed only if it gets to play on its home court. Indiana, based on its play since Kelvin Sampson's firing, probably should have been lower than a No. 8 seed.

All of that is, to some degree, nit-picking. What's most disappointing (again) is the committee's continuing refusal to recognize the unfairness of the play-in game. Coppin State won 15 of 16 games to get into the tournament. Mt. St. Mary's played its way in as a No. 4 seed, winning two road games in the Northeast Conference Tournament to make the tournament for the first time since 1999. Coppin spends its entire preseason on the road because that's how the school funds its program -- playing one guarantee game after another.

For the kids at these two schools making this tournament is the absolute highlight of their basketball careers. And yet, one of them will not get to go to a real tournament site and be part of the practice day with seven other teams and walk onto the court in front of a full house knowing that if they can somehow stay close to a No. 1 seed, the entire country will be tuned in to watch them try to create a miracle.

If the committee must continue this pox of a game it should send the two last at-large teams in the field to Dayton since they are always schools from power conferences. This year, that would probably have created a Villanova-Baylor or perhaps a Villanova-Kentucky matchup. The winner would move into a No. 12 seed and meet a No. 5 seed somewhere on Friday.

Those are power schools from power conferences (granted Baylor is a great story) and the odds are they will have a lot more chances to play in the NCAA tournament and, in many cases, to play pro ball. Since the play-in game was created at the insistence of the power conferences because it didn't want to lose an at-large bid when the Mountain West Conference became the 31st automatic bid conference, let two schools from the power conferences be the participants.

Okay, on to the field. You will get no breakdown of the brackets here (you can tune into Tony Kornheiser's radio show the next four days and hear endless bracket breakdowns, just not from me) but there are a number of storylines well worth following this week.

Start with Georgia, which won four games in the Southeast Conference regular season and then won four more in three days to win the SEC Tournament. The Bulldogs had to play twice on Saturday -- they are now Ernie Banks's favorite college hoops team -- and beat both Kentucky and Mississippi State. They then came back 17 hours later and beat Arkansas to qualify for the tournament with a 17-16 record. In a nice twist the committee sent them to Washington D.C., which is where Coach Dennis Felton (Howard University) went to college.

Felton's not the only Howard grad coaching in the tournament. Mt. St Mary's Milan Brown also went there and he has rebuilt that once-proud program to this point after taking over five years ago from the legendary Jim Phelan.

Drake's Keno Davis took over from his dad, Tom Davis at the start of this season after his dad had produced the school's first winning season (16-14) in forever. The Bulldogs were picked ninth in the Missouri Valley and proceeded to win both the conference and tournament titles going away, finishing 28-4. They open with Western Kentucky, which was a Final Four team in 1971 -- the same year Drake last made the tournament -- and potentially face a tough second round against Connecticut.

Baylor Coach Scott Drew has done remarkable work rebuilding that program since the Dave Bliss debacle, which included the murder of one player by another. You can't go much lower than that but Drew -- son of Valparaiso Coach Homer Drew -- has pieced Baylor back together in four years.

Cornell is in the tournament for the first time in 20 years -- the first team other than Penn or Princeton to represent the Ivy League since 1988 -- and the Big Red is a solid team, even if it probably won't beat Stanford out in Anaheim. (Isn't the pod system, created to limit travel great? Cornell is in Anaheim; George Mason is in Denver; Gonzaga is in Raleigh and Arizona is in D.C. -- Yup, they've cut down on travel alright).

In the end, the usual suspects will probably make it to San Antonio. George Mason, has a chance to be this year's George Mason by upsetting Notre Dame and perhaps Washington State, but none of the little guys are going to match what the Patriots did two years. This tournament is set up to make sure the TV teams end up on TV at the finish. That's why the pod system exists. Not because anyone cares about "student-athletes."

So, look for the high seeds to be playing in two weeks for Final Four spots. The bet here is that no one lower than a No. 4 seed makes the elite eight although Southern California (No. 6 in the midwest) or West Virginia (No. 7 in the west) could surprise people.

The real fun comes this week when the little guys, even with everything against them, get their chance to make noise. If you love this event you will be pulling for Drake, for Butler, for Gonzaga, for Davidson (even if the latter two have to play each other) and for UMBC, American and the winner of Mt. St. Mary's-Coppin State. No 16-seed has ever won a game in this tournament (0-for-92) and it isn't likely to happen this year.

Maybe someday. If it ever happened, the committee and CBS would probably go insane.