NATIONAL COLLEGE ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION MEDIA CONFERENCE

March 16, 2003

Jim Livengood

JIM LIVENGOOD: Thank you, Bill. Let me just start with that. Let me kind of preface it a little bit before we get into it. As we all know, college basketball right now with the parity is going to get tougher and tougher in terms of when we start getting into the tournament, selecting 34 teams. A committee of 10 people, 10 other people, might select other teams. This group did the very best job that we thought that we possibly could. We spent an inordinate amount of time to trying to make sure we're considering every team, doing all the things possible to make sure that no team is at a disadvantage. In regards to what Bill is talking about, the committee has asked in previous years that we, in fact, really do value strength of schedule, we do encourage teams to go out and schedule well, try to do the very best job in their non-conference games because they don't have control in their own conference. Some teams that have done a great job and consequently have been rewarded as we look through get into our selection process and get into seeding and bracketing. As we go down through, sometimes in realizing there are many factors, sometimes the deciding factor can be things like that. If everything else is equal, not that it's the factor, but it could be a fact that somebody's just really done a great job of scheduling and done what the committee had asked. With that, I might serve you better by answering questions you might have or would have.

JIM LIVENGOOD: I don't think they've overemphasized at all. I think you answered the question at the beginning. It really is one of many factors. What happens is, when we get into this part of the basketball season, towards the end, I think that tends to be focused on more by a lot of people in thinking, The only factor or major factor is how you play in those last 10 games. It really is not; it's over the full course, full body of work as we say, full course of the season. There are many, many other factors that come into play, not just how you play at the end of the year. Does that help? Certainly it does. In some cases where teams might not have played as well at the end, we have to look at the whole season. If we don't, we really have put a lot of teams at a disadvantage and not valued what they've done during the full course of the season.

JIM LIVENGOOD: I don't think you could say that. It's really hard to predict in terms of what effect a team not being in the tournament, not being eligible, would have on another team. Butler had an outstanding year and was rewarded as such in terms of entry into the tournament as an awfully nice basketball team.

JIM LIVENGOOD: It's not a problem, it just again speaks to the fact of the parity in college basketball. Conference tournaments are valued, as is regular season conference play. One of the things that made Friday so interesting and difficult both is Friday afternoon, there were a lot of games that probably did not go the way that some may or may not have predicted. The committee doesn't predict. We react to what happens in terms of a game that's played. The conference tournaments in some cases enhanced team's chances, in other cases they didn't. But the conference tournament, we can't make too much of the fact that that's the answer to all. It's the whole body of work the entire year.

JIM LIVENGOOD: Well, that raises another kind of question, and that is, if that would have happened, the committee has the contingency to be able to deal with that. Those are the kinds of things that do happen on occasion. The hard thing is when you play your tournament on Sunday, play it late, we have to be ready for that, be ready for the selection.

JIM LIVENGOOD: Well, that's what's great about this committee. You have 10 people who are absolutely dedicated to college basketball and really dedicated to doing the very best job they can to select these 34 at-large teams. Sometimes the unfair part of it is the fact that people will look at the bracket that's put out and not realize the amount of time that's put into making sure that every team is discussed. The toughest problem that we have is just trying to make sure that we spend an inordinate amount of time, that we don't leave out anybody, we don't leave anybody out of the tournament that should be in the tournament. That challenge, as I mentioned at the very opening, is going to get tougher. With the parity in college basketball, as more teams look an awful lot alike, kind of as the saying goes: At the end of the day, somebody has to make a decision. That somebody would be the 10 of us. Somebody gets in, somebody doesn't. But it's an exciting time. It's going to be a tremendous tournament with the teams we have in it.

JIM LIVENGOOD: Well, question number one, certainly Texas Tech was considered. Every team is considered. What you have right there tends to be those teams that with great records and so on. But Texas Tech certainly was considered, there's no question about it. The other part of it, I think the committee would do a tremendous disservice if we did try to look ahead, if we did try to predict and try to become matchmakers. When we match-make, when we bracket, and before that when we seed, we're trying to do it with the available data that we have and trying to make sure that we're being fair to everybody, and as importantly being fair to the process. I think we would do the process a great injustice if we were to try to put teams together because it maybe an intriguing match-up or in the case as was suggested earlier we try to look ahead and say these two teams have a chance to meet for the national championship, why would we certainly want to have them play in the semifinals? It's just the way it happens and it's just the way it happened to work out. The committee does not try to in any way predict who might win.

JIM LIVENGOOD: Yes, Luke talks to me every day, in a very good way. Yes, he will talk to me on Monday, probably by phone though because I'll be gone for a while. The other part of it, certainly the west could, but we spent time, and remember, it's a national tournament, and we try to do the very best job we can to balance the four regions. What might look balanced to us might not look balanced to somebody else. But the committee spends a lot of time trying to make sure we balance across the four regions. Again, it tends to be in the eye of the beholder many times how brackets look, what might be the toughest or weakest or so on.

JIM LIVENGOOD: Well, there might be makeup calls in some sports, other things. There's no makeup call with the committee. Remember, one of the principles that is a guiding principle for us is that we start over new each year. It does not matter who's been in the tournament, it does not matter who's had a record. We start completely fresh. So teams are considered at the start of this year as nobody having been in the tournament. There's no such thing with the committee as a makeup call.

JIM LIVENGOOD: Well, I think oftentimes, this is a good example of this particular year, there's a number of teams that could be No. 1 seeds. When you get down to it, as you all understand, we can only have four No. 1 seeds. We can only have four. Somebody has to not make that cut. We look at it every way possible. When we made that decision, we had Texas and Oklahoma as No. 1 seeds, and Kansas as the No. 2. Does Kansas deserve to be a No. 1? They were considered along with the other three, but at some point we can only go with four.

JIM LIVENGOOD: I think you are wrong to assume that. You know what, obviously we seed from 1 to 65 to help in our seeding process that in turn turns into our bracketing process. But I think you are wrong to assume that the team that's going to play the winners of the opening round game between 64 and 65, that's probably wrong.

JIM LIVENGOOD: Well, in the case of Auburn, Auburn, they were .500 in the conference, eight and eight. They had a good year, played a good schedule, maybe not as great a schedule as Alabama. They advanced a game in the tournament. So when you looked at Auburn over the course of the year, again realizing, remembering now that we're looking at a lot of teams, and as we zero in and narrow down, we're trying to make sure that we're considering everybody. But the committee spent an awful lot of time looking at Auburn, certainly looking at Alabama, as we did every other team.

JIM LIVENGOOD: Again, Gonzaga is an example of a team that -- all of the teams -- what we try to do is make sure we're looking at how teams look like when they played teams in the tournament at that time as we're going through it, and their whole body of work. Sometimes there are teams that have bad losses during the course of the season. As we looked at Gonzaga, Gonzaga was a team we really felt as a committee deserved to be in the tournament based on their body of work, if you will, the entire season.

JIM LIVENGOOD: We have a great deal of knowledge on every team, and certainly we take into consideration those people who did not play sometimes through ineligibility academically, sometimes through injuries. The committee weighs all of that as we go through our process of selecting teams. Again, certainly all of those play into it.

JIM LIVENGOOD: Absolutely. The Big-12 had a great year as reflected by their records, both non-conference certainly and conference.

JIM LIVENGOOD: The bracketing system we're using right now, we're trying to make sure certainly that teams on the top five lines, we are trying to keep -- we're trying to keep everybody closer to home. As we all know, that's not possible as you go down through each region. We did consciously try to make sure we were not putting teams at a disadvantage based on locale in terms of wherever they fell in the bracketing process. From a conscious standpoint, certainly the committee -- I thought the committee did a great job of really looking at it in great detail. We'll see.

JIM LIVENGOOD: Obviously, we're planning on playing the tournament right now. We certainly have had great communication and contact with all authorities. We'll just have to see as we move forward. Right now the tournament is scheduled to go forward. We're excited about that. Everything is moving forward.

JIM LIVENGOOD: It was not part of our conversation. All of the information we had is the University of Georgia had been withdrawn from the SEC tournament as well as the NCAA tournament.

JIM LIVENGOOD: Well, the committee tries to do the very best job we can to make sure that after selection seeding and then on into bracketing, that we're very diligent in terms of that responsibility. If the question is, would it help to have the tournament played earlier? It could. We try to make sure that we have, as we look forward, trying to make sure that a team isn't disadvantaged. But oftentimes that's hard because the tournament is played so late.

JIM LIVENGOOD: Your first question, you're absolutely right with regards to schedule and Alabama. The second part of it, the committee spent a tremendous amount of time talking about where teams were going to play - in fact, probably spent as much time this year as any year I've been on the committee in terms of what region and where people are going to be, who might be at a disadvantage or certainly at an advantage. At the end of the process, the feeling was very candidly that Pittsburgh wasn't disadvantaged at all with regards to where they were sent.

JIM LIVENGOOD: I'm sorry, the question is what?

JIM LIVENGOOD: Certainly that's one factor in terms of what we call the body of work over the entire conference. We certainly did look at the fact that they had the three losses towards the end. The other factor is that always comes into play, as you look through the seeding process, is sometimes it might not be clear why somebody is a No. 2 or No. 3 or whatever the seed is, but if you go further, as the committee does, it's hard to project who would be better in that role. We try to make sure we're looking at every possible angle, we have a lot of eyes looking at it, we have a lot of ears listening. That part of it right there we determined as a committee that that was the right spot for the University of Florida to be.

JIM LIVENGOOD: I think you've answered it there with the question. When you have a national tournament, as this is, and with our sites spread out across the country, sometimes it is hard to keep team, even on the top five lines, close to home. That probably some days sounds better than it is in practicality. So as we move teams, we're trying to look -- the principle we're trying to operate under is keeping teams closer to home, but it's not practical in terms of trying to make sure that we have balanced regionals, we have balanced areas in terms of teams across the country. That plays into it. Sometimes probably doesn't look as good to some as it does to us as we spend a great deal of time trying to balance all that out.

JIM LIVENGOOD: As I mentioned, there's a number of teams that we considered to be No. 1 seeds. When it gets right down to it, the head to head certainly with Texas and Kansas, you know, Texas won.

JIM LIVENGOOD: I'm sorry. I was thinking about Oklahoma. That's, again, one measure with regards to trying to measure and evaluate out and separate teams out. The hard thing is trying to fit five teams into four spots.

JIM LIVENGOOD: That part I don't know, I wasn't there.

JIM LIVENGOOD: Well, what my perception might be, myself or my peers, we don't talk about those kinds of things. All of our hats come off when we go in to start this selection process earlier in the week. We don't come back and say what really happened and so on and so forth. I think people would be amazed at the tremendous integrity with this process.

JIM LIVENGOOD: Again, we don't count teams in conferences. We evaluate teams, not conferences. It's hard to say. It's not about another team being added from any particular conference. It's trying to look at a number of schools and to the best of our ability determine who should be the next team in.

JIM LIVENGOOD: Strength of schedule certainly would be a factor. Play during the conference season would be another factor.

JIM LIVENGOOD: Again, as we go through and talk about a large number of teams, we can only select 34. As we try to go through, we try to make sure we're evaluating people on exactly the same criteria. That criteria lists a number of things, one of which is strength of schedule, those kinds of things. At the end, simply we felt that the teams that got in were more deserving than the two that were left out there in your particular example.

JIM LIVENGOOD: It could have been. Again, strength of schedule, we've asked teams, the committee has asked teams to do it, and many have stepped up. Obviously, that will make the process harder down the road.

JIM LIVENGOOD: That's another factor as we go forward. It's one thing to play a tougher schedule; it's another thing that certainly the objective needs to be to try to win those games. So it's not just trying to enhance the schedule.

JIM LIVENGOOD: Any time you have two teams play, as the committee is looking at a number of teams, and everything across the board tends to be even, and in many cases that happens, certainly a head to head helps. When one team plays another, it has a chance to move one ahead of the other. That's always helpful. Does it always work? No. But it's very helpful, particularly as close as our teams were this year.

JIM LIVENGOOD: I don't think we can speculate on that. As we go through, remember now, we're looking at teams not in terms of when they're in, but we're looking at teams over the course of the season. The conference tournaments, again, are just another factor in that process.