How does the NCAA Tournament selection process work?

Every year after the brackets come out on Selection Sunday, the decisions by the NCAA selection committee are poured over by college basketball fans everywhere. Did the committee try and create matchups for ratings? Why did team x get put in the bracket of death or why did they miss the tournament entirely? So how does the selection and bracketing process work? It's a complicated process so I'm going to split this into two posts. For now I'll talk about how the committee selects the 68 teams that will be playing in the NCAA tournament

The committee is comprised of 10 members, typically athletic directors or conference commissioners. Each member keeps tabs on a couple conferences throughout the season, and updates the other members on a weekly conference call to discuss injuries and other situations that might affect a team's performance. Whenever a team is being discussed from a certain conference, that conference's commissioner must not be present for the discussion. The same goes for the athletic director of a school being discussed. Athletic directors of other schools in a conference can provide factual information about other teams in their conference but cannot provide opinions.

In the week leading up to the tournament the committee meets in Indianapolis to put together the final seed list 1-68, and the bracket. Every member is given a list of all 351 teams in division 1 basketball and are asked to select 36 teams they believe should be at-large selections. They must then choose other teams that should also be considered for an at-large selection. There is no limit to the number of teams that can be added to this list.

If at least 8 of the 10 committee members include a team in their initial ballot of the 36 teams, then they are automatically moved into the tournament field. If a team received at least 3 votes on either ballot, then they are moved to the "under consideration" category. Teams who won or shared their conference regular season title are also moved to this category.

The committee then begins to evaluate the teams in the under consideration category. If there are 20 or more teams in this category, each member will select 8 that they believe should be at large selections. If there are 14-19 teams remaining, each member will select 6 teams and if there are 13 or fewer teams, each member will select 4 from the list. The teams selected by members are ranked in a points system, i.e. the best team gets 1 point, 2nd best 2 etc. If 8 teams are being considered, the 4 with the fewest points will be entered into the field and so on and so forth until all 36 at-large bids are filled.

From here, the committee adds in the teams who received auto-bids for winning their conference tournaments and the seeding process begins. I'll cover how that process and the bracketing process work in another blog post later this week, so stay tuned for that!