Inside the NCAA Selection Process: How Teams Punch Their Ticket to Tampa Bay

By Joey Johnston

If you’re new to the art and science of how the 68-team field is selected for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament — or if you’re wondering which teams are headed for the March 20 and 22 early round NCAA games at downtown Tampa’s Benchmark International Arena — you’re bound to have tons of questions.

Buckle in.

We’re here to help.

So why is it a near-certainty that the Florida Gators will be sent to Tampa Bay?

And how is it that the USF Bulls (with a campus some 16 miles away from Benchmark) have zero shot at being placed in Tampa Bay, while a distant program such as Utah State might wind up on Channelside Drive?

Why might Mid-American Conference darling Miami (Ohio) have to sweat out Selection Sunday when it had an unbeaten regular season and clearly deserves a spot? 

How could brand names such as Auburn, Cincinnati, Indiana and Ohio State potentially not be included in the field, while the Retrievers (Maryland-Baltimore County), Billikens (Saint Louis), Vikings (Portland State), Anteaters (UC-Irvine), Bison (Howard) and Midshipmen (Navy) and Lumberjacks (Stephen F. Austin) have great shots at earning their way onto the bracket?

What in the world is the NET and WAB? And how could those acronyms affect your hoops-loving life?

Here’s a primer on how the NCAA Men’s Basketball Selection Committee operates and how the 68-team field is selected.

Who is on the NCAA selection committee?

There are 12 members (each selected for a five-year term). Keith Gill (Sun Belt Conference commissioner) is the chairperson. Committee members include Greg Byrne (Alabama athletic director), Mark Coyle (Minnesota AD), Irma Garcia (Manhattan AD), Stu Jackson (West Coast Conference commissioner), Arthur Johnson (Temple AD), Zack Lassiter (Abilene Christian AD), Martin Newton (Samford AD and vice-chairperson), Lee Reed (Georgetown AD), Chad Weiberg (Oklahoma State AD), John Wildhack (Syracuse AD) and Tom Wistrcill (Big Sky Conference commissioner). 

Wait, hold up, these people all represent specific schools or conferences. Not fair. Won’t they have bias?

The NCAA has very specific criteria that guard against any bias or favoritism. For example, a committee member cannot be present during discussions or seeding of a team they represent as an athletic director or commissioner. They cannot vote for a team they represent (or a team that is transitioning in their conference). They can only provide general, factual information about teams from their own conference. Committee members must also recuse themselves from discussion/voting if an immediate family member is a men’s basketball athlete, coaching staff member or senior athletic administrator at an institution.

When do committee members begin their work?

Would you believe … November? Obviously, it gets down to the nitty-gritty in the final weeks before Selection Sunday, when the committee members convene at NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis. But each committee member watches a whole lot of basketball games, while beginning the ongoing review process about three weeks before their Thanksgiving turkey was carved.

So what do the committee members actually do during November, December, January and February? According to the NCAA, they rely on a broad set of observations, consultations, and data resources made available to them with the fine-tuning occurring in March.

Besides the fabled “eye test’’ and actually watching games, committee members participate in calls that monitor each conference. They are given NABC tournament advisory committee rankings, complete box scores, head-to-head results, results versus common opponents, imbalanced conference schedules and results, overall and non-conference strength of schedule, quality wins and losses, road record, player and coach availability, along with various computer metrics.

That laundry list of data allows committee members to form their own opinions, which leads to the committee’s consensus position on the selection and seeding of the 68-team field.

What is the committee’s job?

There are three main tasks:

* Selecting the 37 best at-large teams.

* Seeding the field of 68 teams (including the 31 automatic qualifiers that earn spots by winning their conference tournament).

* Placing the teams into the championship bracket. There can be some adjustments to avoid rematches from regular-season games and promote favorable geographic placements. But the committee wants to stay true to the seedings, so teams won’t often move up or down on the lines.

So there’s a great chance for the Florida Gators to wind up in Tampa Bay. Why is that?

Beginning in 2003, the committee emphasized keeping as many higher-seeded teams as close to home as possible. Overall, the committee wants to keep each team close to its natural reason, but that can’t be achieved for everyone in a national tournament with sites from coast to coast.

Florida figures to earn a No. 2 seed (maybe a No. 1, if the Gators win out and capture the SEC Tournament). With Tampa Bay about two hours down the road, it’s the natural site for the Gators (as it was in 2003 and 2011, when UF was also sent to Tampa Bay).

Why doesn’t the same geographic favoritism exist for USF if it wins the American Conference Tournament? 

USF is the host institution for the games at Benchmark International Arena. By NCAA rule, host institutions are prohibited from playing NCAA games at the home-site court.

Miami (Ohio) just finished a 31-0 regular season. So why should the RedHawks be sweating it out if they don’t win the Mid-American Conference Tournament and clinch the MAC’s automatic bid?

The RedHawks could be fine either way, but you never know. You’d think a 31-1 record, let’s say, would be good enough for an at-large bid. But Miami played a weak non-conference schedule and there’s talk about a power-conference school being favored in that selection scenario.

It’s the age-old debate. Should the NCAA committee be selecting the most deserving teams or the best teams?

David Worlock, media coordinator for the NCAA Tournament, said the wording is clear.

“The committee’s charge is to select the best teams — and they make a distinction between best and most-deserving,’’ Worlock said. “Who you play, where did you play and how you did in those games has universally been the most important part of the process to answer those questions.

“Of course, people will disagree with some of the decisions made by the committee and that’s OK. If you scroll down your Twitter feed, you’ll see an array of opinions on anything. With the committee, it’s 12 opinions based on a season-long evaluation of the teams that literally begins on Day One of the season. And there are all sorts of factors that go into those evaluations.

“If you have a team that loses some games at the buzzer, sometimes people will give sympathy to that team. But it’s not the committee’s job to give sympathy or seek out the feel-good stories. The committee sets all of that aside and chooses who they deem as the best team. It’s not supposed to be filled with emotion. It’s factual and data-driven and they can utilize an array of predictive metrics.’’

What metrics are utilized and how do they work?

For decades, the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) was the be-all, end-all metric that reflected a team’s viability through its schedule strength, home/road record, scoring and defense. But the RPI has been “retired’’ in favor of some more modern tools.

The committee utilizes the following metrics to evaluate teams:

NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET), Wins Above Bubble (WAB), BPI and Strength of Record (developed by ESPN), KenPom Rankings, KPI and Torvik.

The NET, in place since the 2018-19 season, gets the most attention. But Worlock cautioned that “a certain NET ranking doesn’t guarantee your inclusion in the field, nor does it guarantee your exclusion from the field.’’

The NET evaluates the quality of your opponents and how you perform against them. It utilizes five criteria — game results, strength of schedule, game location, scoring margin (capped at 10 points per game) and net offensive/defensive efficiency.

The NET strives for impartiality by not factoring in when you play an opponent, but reflecting only how good that team is at the present moment. So teams can’t get an artificial boost from beating an opponent early in the season when that team later proves to be mediocre. The NET uses a quadrant system to contextualize wins and losses based on opponent quality and game location. 

“The quadrants get a lot of attention, but it’s simply a sorting tool,’’ Worlock said. “You can quickly glance at the team sheet and see if there’s a lot of red on there. That means a lot of losses. If there are a lot of games on the left side of the screen, that means they played a lot of tough opponents. If there are games on the right side of the screen, that means they didn’t play tough opponents. It’s a way to get a quick glance at a team’s relative strength.’’

NET rankings are fluid and updated daily. Teams can earn Quad 1 wins (highest-ranked teams) down through Quad 4 wins (lowest-ranked teams). 

For example, Quad 1 wins are classified as opponents ranked 1-30 (with the game played on your home court), 1-50 (neutral court), and 1-75 (road).  Quad 2 classifications are 31-75 (home), 51-100 (neutral), and 76-135 (road). Quad 3 classifications are 76-160 (home), 101-200 (neutral), and 136-240 (road). Quad 4 classifications are 161-353 (home), 201-353 (neutral), and 241-353 (road). 

Why isn’t Miami (Ohio) already considered an NCAA Tournament lock? It has zero Quad 1 games (of course, some of those teams might have refused to schedule Miami, but that’s another matter). It helps greatly to have Quad 1 games. You need to win some, but you aren’t punished severely for the losses (and that nuance has been criticized).

The key to understanding NET: Your team’s NET isn’t as important as the NET of your team’s opponents.

The NCAA’s most trendy metric — Wins Above Bubble (WAB) — was introduced last season. It uses a combination of each opponent’s strength and the location of the game, putting a score on each game based on how likely the standard bubble team (No. 45 in the NET) would be to win. Translation: Big-time opponents bring big-time WAB payouts for wins (and relatively small WAB hits for losses). 

Bottom line: The NCAA believes evaluation factors such as the NET and WAB can help to effectively separate teams that look alike at first glance.

OK, that’s an awful lot of detailed information. Look, I have tickets to the March 20 and 22 NCAA games at Benchmark International Arena. Which eight teams are coming to Tampa Bay? Can you help and give me a preview?

Here’s our best guess:

The Florida Gators have a great chance at Tampa Bay, along with another SEC team. You can probably count on a couple of ACC teams and maybe one from the Big Ten or Big 12. After that? It’s a crapshoot.

That’s the frustration (and joy) of conference tournament week. After sifting through the proliferation of buzzer-beaters, along with players and mascots you’ve never heard of, we’ll have clarity on Selection Sunday.

Then it’s time for March Madness to return to Tampa Bay.