No one has been allowed on the floor, let alone in the room, for police guards have been monitoring the hallways, the elevators, perhaps even the closets. None of the denizens of the 15th floor of the Westin Indianapolis have been allowed to take a phone call. Faxes? Please. Maybe, if she figured out an end-around, someone's wife got through. Maybe.
Welcome to the Westin's top floor, a combination of Springfield, Mass., birthplace of basketball, and, say, Alcatraz. Here, in this basketball prison, the members of the NCAA men's basketball committee have been meeting since Wednesday, trying to figure out the best answers to the only sports questions that matter this evening: Who's in? and Who's out?
Indianapolis's convention center is across one street from the Westin. The state capitol is across another. The Big Ten tournament is at Conseco Fieldhouse, just three blocks away. None of the surroundings, though, matter to the nine men and one woman who comprise the committee.
"You're sequestered," said North Carolina State Athletic Director Lee Fowler, who chaired the committee in 2002.
"You don't leave for five days," said Citadel Athletic Director Les Robinson, who is, almost assuredly, on the 15th floor right now.
Tonight, the field for the NCAA tournament will be announced on national television. Immediately following the announcement, this year's committee chairman, Iowa Athletic Director Bob Bowlsby, will emerge from his cocoon, join CBS's Jim Nantz and Billy Packer, and offer a little insight — usually, a very little insight — into how those 10 people made hundreds of decisions that led them to put 65 teams into 16 seeds in each of four regions, with one play-in game.
Their verdicts will affect the players, coaches and fans of the schools in the tournament and the dozens of hopefuls left out — and will be Xeroxed literally millions of times nationwide as the starting point for office betting pools, touching off the annual three-week festival of college basketball mania.
Speaking for the committee, Bowlsby's reasoning will be scrutinized, analyzed, criticized and — if he's lucky -- praised. Over the past five days, each committee member may have left the Westin for an hour, maybe two, just to get some air, to breathe, to briefly remind themselves that there is an outside world. Isn't there?
"If you are a basketball junkie," said George Washington Athletic Director Jack Kvancz, a former committee member, "it is the greatest five days that you'll spend -- ever. I'm serious. I think, for me, it was the greatest thing since the birth of my children."
The Process
How the NCAA tournament selection committee reaches its decisions is one of the most closely guarded secrets in college sports. But a series of interviews with a half-dozen committee members — past and present — in the weeks leading up to this year's session provide a glimpse at what life is like for them as they cloister inside the Indianapolis hotel.
The five days in which the committee first decides which teams to invite, then seeds the entire field from 1 to 65, and finally puts the teams in the bracket are the culmination of the selection process, the end of the work. But the process actually begins in the fall. Each member is assigned a group of teams — usually two or three conferences — to which they must pay special attention over the course of the season. Each has a satellite dish or a digital cable package — and not to catch "The Sopranos."
"If I was at home, I had a game on," said former committee member Craig Thompson, the commissioner of the Mountain West Conference. "If you added up, in the five years I was on the committee, I watched hundreds of games — easily."
In February, the committee gathers in Indianapolis and holds a mock selection to familiarize new members with the process -- "purely a training and orientation exercise," Bowlsby said. In practice, though, it also serves to familiarize all the members with the national scene, to provide them with a forum to discuss teams and conferences, schedules and -- here's that March buzz phrase -- RPI, a ranking system that considers strength of schedule. It is a basketball education, and if you're not educated, you're in trouble.
"If you haven't done your homework, in two minutes, I know that," Kvancz said. "Very rarely does that happen. You just can't B.S. your way through it."
On Tuesday night, prior to the tip-off of the major conference tournaments, the committee arrives in Indianapolis, where the NCAA is headquartered, and dines together. On Wednesday morning, when they walk into the main meeting room at the Westin — the size of two suites with one wall knocked out, bottled water and soda and cookies on one table, reams of paper offering information on every conference and every team strewn across others — they stare directly at three boards. One is labeled "AQ" — automatic qualifiers.
When this year's members arrived in the room Wednesday, a Velcro-backed panel with "Gonzaga" printed on it was already on that board. There was one for Virginia Commonwealth. Princeton, Central Florida, Northern Iowa — all the schools that had already qualified for the NCAAs by winning their conferences and earning an automatic berth — were each affixed to the AQ board. Eventually, 31 names will adorn that real estate. They will not move. They are in.
The other two boards generate the discussion. Hours of discussion. Days of discussion.
"We draw upon every scrap of information we can possibly get," Bowlsby said.
When the committee members arrive, they are issued two sheets of paper. One might be green, the other yellow. On the green sheet, each member is to circle any school that he or she feels, at that moment, is worthy of an at-large berth. That school, the committee member determines, doesn't even need to be discussed. Any school that appears on at least eight of the 10 ballots is put on the second board: "At-large," referred to by some committee members as the "In" board.
"Now, does that mean they're definitely in? No," Robinson said. "But there's a good chance they're going to be in."
On the yellow sheet, each member circles any team it believes should be up for discussion. A team need only appear on two sheets to be placed on a third board, "At-large nomination." As a safeguard against overlooking smaller programs with worthy accomplishments, any team that won its regular season conference championship, but lost in its conference tournament — this year, for instance, Southern Illinois — is placed on the nomination board.
Then, the voting — all by secret ballot — begins.
Casting Their Votes
As with the entire process, there are ground rules, laid out as simply as possible in an eight-page document titled, "Principles and Procedures for Establishing the Bracket."
Among the first principles listed: Athletic directors — which this year comprise eight of the 10 members — aren't allowed to be in the room when their schools are discussed. Conference commissioners must leave the room when any of their member schools are considered. In 2002, the committee added a provision that ADs couldn't speak about teams in their own conferences unless directly asked about them.
"If I'm at N.C. State, and the ACC gets an extra team in, that affects me financially, because the conference makes more money," Fowler said. "So we changed it."
This, though, is an excruciating time. In 2000, for instance, the newly formed Mountain West Conference didn't have an automatic bid. Two of its teams — UNLV and Utah — were on the edge, perhaps in, perhaps out. Thompson, the conference's commissioner and the committee chair that year, spent a good deal of time out of the room.
"That's tough," he said. "You go back to your room. You stare at the phone. You can sometimes get ideas. Is it a long conversation? Is it a short conversation?
"Then, when the phone rings and you go back in, you try to be all cool and collected. You try to be subtle about it, but you're just wondering: Where did the vote fall out? Are they still under consideration? Or are they gone? You try to read faces."
That season, both the Runnin' Rebels and the Utes received bids.
How the committee finally issues those bids is an exhausting process. Typically, the members are first asked to vote for their top eight teams from the "At-large nomination" board. Any team receiving seven of 10 votes moves to the "In" board. Each member then considers the eight teams receiving the most votes that haven't yet moved to the "In" board, ranking them from one to eight. The team most worthy is assigned one point, the team least worthy eight. The four teams with the lowest point total move to the "In" board — at least, that is, until they are voted back off, which can happen.
And so on. And so on. Till lunch. Into the afternoon. Till 10 pm. And again the next morning. One year, by midday Friday, when the process had truly been in high gear for only a day-and-a-half, the committee had already taken 50 votes.
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"We vote over and over and vote over and vote again," Robinson said. "We just keep voting."
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X-Factors
And they keep discussing. In another room on the 15th floor of the Westin sit TVs, tuned to whatever games are taking place right at that moment. Frequently, the members will gather around during a break, watch a given game, and learn more about the two teams. Just as talking heads and bracketologists are pontificating on who's in and who's out, the members are still forming opinions.
The discussions around a single team can be mind-numbing.
"I'm not exaggerating: It could be an hour, two hours, three hours," Kvancz said. "People who believe that [their team] doesn't get a discussion are wrong. Other than checking your underwear to see if there's any stains, we do everything possible."
In 2000, for instance, there was considerable angst in the room. North Carolina, which had been to 25 straight NCAA tournaments, went just 9-7 in a fairly weak ACC, just 18-13 overall.
"We weren't sure what we were going to do with them," Kvancz said. "We went around and around and around. We dissected them backwards and forwards."
Every piece of information is available to the committee. Was a key player injured? What was the team's record without him? At any point, the committee chair can ask for what's called a "nitty-gritty" report on specific teams, which offers a 13-point comparison ranging from the teams' Division I records to their RPI to their records in the last 10 games to their road records.
"It gets tense," Kvancz said, "particularly if you think 'X' is good and I think 'Y' is good."
But this is, after all, a basketball tournament. So at some point, the committee members talk, of all things, basketball. The former coaches on the committee — this year, men such as Robinson and Virginia Athletic Director Craig Littlepage — might get pointed questions.
"The thing I would always ask," Kvancz said, "is, 'On a neutral court, who would you least want to play?' And then you'd give an answer, but you'd have to explain: Why?"
"You come up with answers," Robinson said. " 'They're so good defensively. They're deep. They defend the break. They defend motion.' In reverse, when you're a coach, you're studying the same things."
In 2000, the committee went back and forth on North Carolina. Robinson, a graduate of rival N.C. State, said: "I'm obviously not a North Carolina fan. But I had seen them play recently. I thought I knew why, in November and December, they had struggled. I thought they recovered."
The committee admitted the Tar Heels, and seeded them eighth in the South Region. They advanced to the Final Four.
"We looked like geniuses," Kvancz said.
Planting the Seeds
By late Saturday afternoon, the committee almost always has a handle on which 65 teams will be invited. The next trick: seeding the field.
"You get through: Okay, they're in," Thompson said. "Now, where do you put them?"
The bracket is released with four regions seeded 1-16. The committee, though, seeds the field 1-65, meaning the best No. 1 seed will face the worst No. 16, and so on. The final two seeds face each other in the play-in game, which will take place Tuesday night in Dayton, Ohio.
"It's hair-splitting, when you get down to those last few teams," Thompson said.
Much of the discussion in the hours following the bracket's release will center on seeding. Who's too high? Who's too low? Who got jobbed? But each year, the members are reminded of something former committee member C.M. Newton — who coached at Alabama and Vanderbilt and was the athletic director at Kentucky — said frequently: You can play your way out of a bad seed, but you can't play your way into the tournament if you're not invited.
By this morning, only five conference championship games will remain to be played. The committee, in some cases, will have an "If this, then that," scenario, depending on the outcomes of those games. In 2002, for instance, Iowa surprisingly played in the Big Ten championship game, where it faced Indiana. The Hawkeyes would not be invited without winning the title. So there was a team — Missouri, perhaps — that would have been left out had Iowa won.
"If the coach of that team knew," Robinson said, "he'd be pulling for that team like he'd never pulled for anybody."
The Hoosiers beat the Hawkeyes. Those situations, in large part, are what wear on those committee members over the five days in Indianapolis.
"It weighs on you heavily, because you know people will be fired, jobs will be lost, careers will be altered," Thompson said. "It's not declaring war on Iraq, but it's very demanding."
The entire process, beginning in the fall and ending with those five days at the Westin, is demanding. Any break is welcome. Robinson, for one, usually tries to sneak down to the workout room and hop on the treadmill during an hour of down time. A couple of years ago, he was walking along, working out, keeping his eye on an old ESPN Classic game, when a fan — attending the Big Ten tournament nearby — asked if he could flip the channel to a live game.
"Sure," Robinson said.
The pair watched for a few minutes.
"Who do you root for?" the fan asked.
Robinson — RPI and strength of schedule and road records all jumbled in his mind — thought for a moment.
"Oh," he said, "I'm not much of a college basketball fan."