Madness

With March Madness in full swing and the first round in action, I wanted to try to make this week’s blog somehow relevant. To millions of sports fans around the country, March (and the beginning of April) represents the time for incredible athletic phenomena. The “Big Dance,” or the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament, traditionally fields 64 teams (68 this year) all vying for the coveted national championship.

The tournament makes and breaks players’ careers. It fosters magical memories, horrible heartbreaks, and the charismatic Cinderella stories that capture the love of the American public.

The NCAA basketball tournament is something easy to go on and on about on various levels. At its foundation though, is a special bracket that the NCAA has developed over the years to seed teams in their quests for the title. And it is herein that the rhetoric lies.

Every year, the Sunday before the tournament starts, otherwise known as “Selection Sunday,” a selection committee (made up of ten representatives from the major athletic conferences and a few individual athletic directors from various universities) chooses the teams that have earned the right to play in the tournament and the seeds that they will be assigned. Roughly half of the teams receive automatic bids for winning their conference titles, but the remaining teams must be admitted as At-Large entries.

This becomes very subjective. Who gets to be an At-Large team? Let’s look at an easy example. Duke and North Carolina are both in the ACC and both ranked in the top ten in the AP polls. Since only one team can win their conference tournament, only one team gets an automatic bid; since both have showed superiority over the rest of the schools all season though, both will be admitted.

This philosophy works with many of the At-Large bids but not all. What happens, for instance, when a team has beaten five ranked teams over the course of the season, but barely manages to finish about .500? Do they deserve an entry over the team that only lost six games all year but did not play a team ranked higher than fifty? These are the questions the committee faces – and with over three hundred schools to choose from – it is a difficult task.

Many teams that get these special bids are from what are called the Power Conferences, these are conferences (like the Big 10, Big 12, Big East, etc.) that have the biggest schools and generally have more money. Many “Mid-Major” Conferences complain that they don’t receive a fair shot at a bid, and are discriminated against because of lack of size.

It is the rhetoric of choosing the right schools, and being as fair as possible, that  is so interesting about the Selection Committee.