Selection committee hopes early start will provide more time to pick teams

INDIANAPOLIS -- NCAA Tournament selection committee chairman Tom O'Connor understands how chaotic those last few minutes before the 65-team field is finalized can be on Selection Sunday.

So when he became chairman of the NCAA's highest-profile committee this year, O'Connor wanted to give his colleagues a break.

The 10 committee members who will select the tournament teams are scheduled to arrive one day earlier than usual during selection week, a move intended to provide more time for debate and less tension in the frantic finish leading up to the announcement in Indianapolis.

"First, we're doing it so we can have more discussion on the selections," O'Connor said during a conference call with reporters Tuesday. "That's the most important part of the process because you can't be seeded or bracketed if you're not selected."

Publicly, fans will see little change.

The committee will still spend 12-hour days deciphering numbers, schedules, good victories, bad losses and how injuries or player suspensions may have affected a team's performance throughout the season. Committee members will just have one more day to sift through all of the information and make their decisions.

But behind the scenes, the procedure will be vastly different.

O'Connor, the athletic director at George Mason, and his colleagues will spend the next month using conference calls to get familiar with the selection process, discuss referees' assignments and even debate their initial choices.

By taking care of those procedural matters before coming to Indy, O'Connor believes committee members can spend more time debating and perfecting the pairings.

"The second point of all this is that we've been a little rushed in the bracketing process, and it gives us a little more time to really go through the nuances," he said. "So if we pick up more time in the bracketing, it gives us a little more time to look back and see what we've done."

The last-minute rush has led to past mistakes, such as the year Brigham Young was scheduled to play on a Sunday in the regional finals -- something the school prohibits because of its religious values. Eventually, the committee corrected the problem by moving Brigham Young to a regional that played on a Saturday.

There will be other modifications, too.

Traditionally, the committee has used a team's record in its last 10 games as one factor in determining which teams make the field. This year, the committee will look at a team's record over the final 12 games because of the increase in exempt games typically played outside the continental U.S.