Published: March 19, 2008 10:41 pm            

From the Press Box: Transparency needed in NCAA selection process

By the time you read this, chances are you won’t care about the why’s and wherefore’s of who’s in and who was left out of the NCAA Tournament.

It’s hard to underestimate the cleansing powers of today’s lunch-time NCAA Tournament tipoff.

After five days chock full of rancor about jilted schools, seed parsing, whining pundits (Has Billy Packer figured out a way to get the entire ACC membership in the field? Has Digger “Mute Button” Phelps stopped yammering?), and all of the conspiracy theories that go with it, it’s as if Tommie Lee Jones and Will Smith show up with that memory-zapping device from “Men In Black” and wipe it all from our collective conscience.

I’m like everyone else, I love the tournament. But the NCAA practically counts on you to let the mind-numbing fun of the down-to-the-wire thrillers and buzzer-beaters make you forget that they choose the field with very little accountability and no transparency whatsoever.

You’ll know the meaning of life before you ever know why Illinois State was left out of the NCAA field. You’ll solve the riddle of the Sphinx before the mystery of why the heck Oklahoma is a No. 6 seed.

It might just be a tournament to most, but there’s billions of dollars at stake in almost total secrecy. It’s not right, but more on that later.

Like nearly everyone, I had problems with the field, and since I graduated from and now cover a mid-major school, I view it through that prism first. It only goes so far though. Every time I wanted to work myself into a lather over the first one-bid season for the Valley since 1998, and cry inside for Illinois State — left out with a RPI of 33 and a 24-7 record — a voice in my head says, “quality wins, it’s the quality wins, stupid.”

Illinois State didn’t really have any. If the Redbirds had beaten Drake just once in three tries, it would be different. That 30-point loss in the MVC Tournament championship game? Yikes. It was the NCAA bubble equivalent of the Snickers’ Feast Viking half-tooting his horn after dropping his buddy’s candy bar.

My mid-major beef was the way the mid-majors were bracketed. Six mid-majors play each other in the first-round. That’s all well and good, except only six mid-major schools were deemed worthy of at-large bids, so a significant chunk of the mid-majors will cannibalize each other right away.

If just one tournament turns out that way, it’s an anomaly, but it happened last year too. And it seems a few miles south of coincidental that the mid-major vs. mid-major phenomenon occurred in the two tournaments after George Mason made its Final Four run in 2006, when there was more mid-major representation in the field.

One can cite any number of reasons why this might be. The most popular one is that BCS schools want a bigger slice of the lucrative NCAA pie and media attention, because even though three mid-majors are guaranteed to advance, three are wiped out.

It’s like gambling in Vegas. You might win, but the house always wins more.

Another is that CBS gets a guaranteed set of storylines in the second-round or beyond when one of the mid-major “Cinderella’s” advances, even though all they’ve done is beaten one of their peers. The flip side of that is there’s not too many Cinderella’s to knock out old reliables, whose absence might affect CBS’ ratings.

These are conspiracy theories. And like most conspiracy theories, they can make the one espousing them look … well … stupid. The fact is no one but the committee members really know why the mid-majors are paired against each other.

But that’s the point. Why aren’t those answers revealed? Why is secrecy so sacrosanct?

The non-answer answers NCAA committee members spout out after the brackets are released don’t come close to accountability. And as much as I’d be honored to participate in it, the mock bracket they’ve invited selected college basketball media to take part in early February the last two years isn’t enough either. How do we really know that’s how the process plays out?

There’s only one answer. The NCAA needs 100 percent transparency about the entire selection process.

If that means having someone there to dictate minutes from committee discussions — all of them, from Wednesday onward — so be it. If it means having a camera in the room dutifully recording all of the conversations, go for it. If it means having digital voice recorders to record why someone is debating for or against a school, fire ’em up.

I’m not saying this information should be available immediately after the brackets are announced. That’s impossible. Release it after the tournament if need be, but release it. Get it on the record.

Every NCAA school deserves to know where they stand. Forget about mid-majors vs. mid-majors, shouldn’t Arizona State have an answer as to why they aren’t in? Wouldn’t Indiana like to know why it’s a No. 8 seed? Same for Butler at No. 7.

Transparency equals accountability. No longer would the committee be subjected to accusations of being the sporting equivalent of the smoked-filled room. No longer would non-BCS conferences be left guessing what path they need to take to make the NCAA field. No longer would debate over the veracity of the RPI be needed. No longer would questions exist as to whether certain conferences are allotted a certain amount of spots in the field.

It would all be there for anyone who wants to investigate it. You might disagree with the committee’s rationale, but at least the rationale is spelled out.

The NCAA is paid $6 billion in TV money alone for the NCAA Tournament. The NCAA member schools — many of them taxpayer-funded public schools — deserve to know the decisions the NCAA makes that impacts all of their bottom lines.

The NCAA expects near-Spanish Inquisition-like accountability and transparency in its day-to-day dealings with its members. The same standard should apply to them.

Open this process up.



Todd Golden is sports editor of the Tribune-Star. He can be reached at (812) 231-4272 or todd.golden@tribstar.com.

        

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