John Clay's Sidelines

Back in my hotel room after we wrapped up the first day of the NCAA Men’s Division I College Basketball Tournament Mock Selection Exercise, in association with the US Basketball Writers, here at the NCAA National Center in Indianapolis. Long day. Lot of numbers. Here’s a wrap-up:

• You can see a video about today’s happenings here. (The pic above is a grainy frame of the video.)

• After a series of votes involving moving teams from the “under consideration” category to the “at-large” category, we started seeding teams. The idea is to seed the teams 1-65. As it stands now, and we were told this could all change before we wrap up early tomorrow afternoon, Kansas is the overall No. 1 seed, followed by Syracuse at No. 2, Kentucky at No. 3 and Villanova at No. 4. That would mean that UK would be a No. 1 seed in a particular region. We will start assigning teams to regions tomorrow.

• We ended up seeding just 12 teams. Purdue came in at No. 5, followed by Georgetown, Duke, West Virginia, Kansas State, Ohio State, Wisconsin and Michigan State.

• After our initial ballot, 19 teams were moved into the “at-large” category, meaning teams that would fill the 34 at-large slots to go along with the 31 conference automatic qualifiers, or AQs, as they are called by the committee. The first 19 were, in alphabetical order: BYU, Duke, Georgetown, Kansas, Kansas State, Kentucky, Michigan State, New Mexico, Ohio State, Pittsburgh, Purdue, Syracuase, Temple, Tennessee, Texas, Vanderbilt, Villanova, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

• After the initial ballot, there were 53 teams that went in the “under consideration” category. Judging by the reaction of the NCAA staff members, that appeared to be a high number.

• The next four to go from “under consideration” to “at-large” were Baylor, Georgia Tech, Texas A&M and Wake Forest. That brought the at-large total to 23.

• The next four to go in were UNLV, Rhode Island, Richmond and Northern Iowa. That brought the at-large total to 27.

• The next four to go in where Dayton, Maryland, Clemson and Xavier Illinois which won a tiebreaker with Illinois Xavier. That brought the at-large total to 31.

• After that, the NCAA’s Greg Shaheen, who is guiding the 20 of us through the process, instructed us to start seeding teams. That is a similar process to what we had done previously. You are given a list of teams. You select who you think are the eight best teams. When those votes are tabulated, you take the consensus eight top teams and rank them from 1-8. You do this several times. “Peeling the onion,” Shaheen called it.

• After we seeded the top 12 teams, we were returned to the process of filling in more at-large teams. Making the last cut of the night were Xavier, Florida State, Marquette, Missouri and Ole Miss. That brought the at-large total to 36. Why 36 teams for 34 spots? Because some of the at-large teams will make it into the tournament as automatic qualifiers via their conference tournaments.

• I should mention that while this is all going on, we are informed of “mock” conference tournament results. We are taking a five-day process — the actual committee meets from Wednesday through Sunday — and cramming it into 24 hours. When we got to the part of the process that was usually, say, Friday night, for the actual committee, we were told the conference tournament results from that day.

• We were told that the actual committee starts seeding teams by lunch on Thursday.

• You hear a lot about the RPI. Yes, the RPI is important. But in the discussions about teams, the RPI is really only one factor, and it tends to get discounted quite a bit. Thanks to the endless amount of data we are given about each team, and the capability of calling up team profiles that compare one team versus another in a variety of different ways, it’s often hard to differentiate between two worthy candidates. It seemed today that often big wins, or bad losses, took precedent over actual RPI numbers.

• We are actually in pairs, representing one existing committee member. I’m paired with John Underwood, associate commissioner of the Big 12 conference. We are sitting where Dan Bebee, the Big 12 commissioner, and former OVC commissioner, would be sitting. Therefore, whenever there is an election that includes a Big 12 team, we are not allowed to participate. (The two of us submit just one vote.) Considering the strength of the Big 12, we had to sit out quite a few votes. As well, twice we had to leave the room while the committee was discussing teams from the Big 12 conference.

• Here are the 20 participants: John Akers, Basketball Times; Tom Akins, Associated Press Radio; Dave Birkett, Ann Arbor.com; John Bohnenkamp, The Hawk Eye; Eamonn Brennan, ESPN.com; Steve Carp, the Las Vegas Review Journal; Dan Gavitt, the Big East Conference, Clark Kellogg, CBS Sports; Scott Leykam, West Coast Conference; Kevin McNamara, Providence Journal; Malcolm Moran, USBWA, who actually could not get here from snowbound Penn State; Tom Odjakjian, Big East Conference; Jerry Palm, CollegeRPI.com; Bill Rabinowitz, Columbus Dispatch; Will Roleson, Horizon League; Shannon Ryan, Chicago Tribune; Steve Scheer, CBS Sports; John Underwood, Big 12 Conference; Lindsey Wilhite, Daily Herald; and myself.

• And yes, they did feed us.

• We get back at it tomorrow morning at 8:30 a.m. We’re told we should finish up around 2.