NATIONAL COLLEGE ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION MEDIA CONFERENCE

March 9, 2005

Bob Bowlsby

BOB BOWLSBY: That's a very good question, Bill. It's one that I am glad we have a chance to address early in the process, and I'd be happy to take follow-up questions, as well. I think it's one of the commonly held misconceptions that's there's something magic about a .500 record. 8-8 is one that always comes to mind. It's a matter very much of who the eight wins are against and who the eight losses are against. As we all know, there are some conferences that have some no-plays, there are many conferences that have some one-plays, and if you have eight wins against the bottom of the league and eight losses against the top of the league, that may be very different than a 7-9 record, for instance, or a 9-7 record, where there's a mix of the two. There isn't anything magical about getting to .500. The committee really looks at each of those wins, who they're against, and perhaps who they didn't play or who they played twice. One of the things that we do as we go through this selection process, and it comes into play in the seeding, as well, is we dissect those conference schedules very carefully and we take it a step further and we compare one conference's schedule to another to make sure that as much as possible we're comparing apples and apples.

BILL HANCOCK: Thank you, Bob. We're ready to take questions from the callers.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, it depends on the circumstance. We have some years that you can look at the No. 1 seeds and a couple of them fall into place very easily, and perhaps there are three or four others that are vying for the other two spots. Some years the top line just sort of jumps out at you and there are some fairly clear choices. This year we've had a lot of shake-up in the last seven days relative to some of the teams at the top. In some ways things have changed and in some ways they haven't changed very much. We've got a little bit of work to do. There isn't any doubt that at the top line you got to get it right. They not only have to be in the right sequence relative to the seeding lines, but they have to be in the right order within each seeding line, as well. This year it feels to me like the top line may not be quite as difficult as lines two through eight are going to be. I think while selection is always difficult because you're dealing with a finite number and somebody's always going to be in and somebody's always going to be left out, I think this year we will have a real challenge seeding the tournament lines two through eight. Of course, the reason we seed the tournament is to keep the best teams apart as deep into the tournament structure as we possibly can. It's important we get that right, as well. So I think we're going to have some extended discussion about how we place people on the S-curve, the seeding curve, and I think it may be the biggest challenge we face this year.

BOB BOWLSBY: Let me answer the second one first. Neutral games are dealt with separately. Home games and road games have their own value affixed to them. Relative to the conference RPI, that is an aggregate RPI that is the product of all of the members in that conference, and it takes into account the 25, 50, 25 computation that is there for each individual members and it aggregates the numbers for the entire group within that conference.

BOB BOWLSBY: Yeah, those two are correct. I don't know that the numbers that are out there are going to be accurate completely up and down the schedule of all 31 because we use some different numbers than some of the ones that are bantered around out there.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, I think the easy answer is that at some point in time subjectivity plays a role in it. We have a lot of tools at our disposal, and it's kind of the same process that takes place when we have six or seven teams vying for the last two or three spots in the tournament. Sometimes those teams all look so much alike that you don't feel like you can slide a piece of paper in between the differences. I think the seeding is going to be that way this year, as well. So we're going to look for common opponents, we're going to look for some committee member -- some committee members look at how teams have played them last time, some committee members look at the road record. I think each of us settle in on our own set of things that we value. But there are occasions when we get down and we say, maybe you're the last team possibility on line two versus the first team possibility on line three. Maybe there's a particular game you want to see that's going to make up your mind on that. We try and value the games at the end of the season similarly to the way we value the games in the rest of the year. But the fact of the matter is, we want to put the people in the tournament and put them in the right spot in the tournament based upon who's playing well at the end of the year because that's why we play our tournament. So it is a very difficult process, and we see as much as the public sees the seeding by flights, you know, 1 through 16. We seed 1 through 65 in chronological order. We're very careful to do that because you don't want the wrong teams meeting early in the tournament because then you don't end up with the eventual outcome you want.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, I mean, I wouldn't consider them a headache. We try and put in place contingency plans and we will always take into account everything that we have at our disposal. We're going to move forward as expeditiously as we can on Sunday. There are times when it's difficult. We're not going to guess at outcomes, if it's going to make a major difference in where somebody ends up playing or where they land on the S-curve. But to the extent we can, we will put in place contingency plans and I think the NCAA over the years respects what the conferences do. My conference is one that plays one of those late games. I just think that it's a collaborative process that I don't consider to be particularly difficult to deal with. But there are those occasions when you have less than a hundred percent information. It's just something we work our way through.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, we had some difficulties last year largely because there were five ACC teams on the first four lines. What that does is it causes you some real challenges with regard to your bracketing. I think that may have had as much to do with it. You know, clearly we also weren't able to know the outcome of those last two games either.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, it's a good question. I think that -- I've been asked a lot about the RPI, when we use it, when we don't use it. It's a tool that most of us use relatively early in the process, and we put the refinements in place largely because we wanted to know who was going out and playing people on the road, who was winning on the road, and who wasn't defending their home floor. The refinements to the RPI help to discriminate among institutions relative to those three factors. Where you see a variance from the weighted RPI to the original RPI, that's our system tipping us off that there's maybe something going on there. We never use the RPI as a precision instrument to discriminate among closely grouped teams. We got a 38 RPI, a 39 and a 41. The RPI just never comes up in trying to determine which one of those teams is the best and which one is in second and which one is in third. Our use of it, as we've always said, it's just one tool. It is a tool that we consider a blunt object. It's not intended to be predictive in nature. If we were going to use it that way, I think all we'd probably have to do is run a list of the 34 teams in order and send it in. There's just a lot more to it than that. I really consider the change to the RPI a refinement. You know, clearly there are some people who have viewed the RPI in ways that the committee doesn't view it. I think this refinement has caused them to reassess how they view the RPI to be more consistent with the way the committee views the RPI.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, since they're on our nitty-gritty, and we use it sort of as baseline data, because when we start to see one that moved up or moved down, that's telling us something. That's exactly the information that we wanted to get. It will be there. I think the best way to characterize it is we use it as baseline information. I should also interject that there are lots of tools that committee members use. Some use Sagarin. We look at lots of different things relative to this, and we try to draw upon the best information we can, even if some of it's inconsistent with one another. This is just one thing at our disposal. That's how we use it. I want to provide a clarification on an earlier question. The question was asked about the conference RPIs. I responded that I thought the ACC and PAC-10 were 1 and 2. I'm advised that that's not accurate. ACC is first. The Big-12 is second. Big East is third. PAC-10 is fourth. Just want to correct what I said earlier. I hadn't seen the recent numbers. Bill Hancock set me straight and gave me the right information.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, it's an excellent question. First of all, let me preface the answer by saying we're not ever going to put more than two conference teams in one first and second round site. It is theoretically feasible for two No. 1 seeds to end up at the same place. But we may or may not have opportunity to even consider that issue. We go through and assign sites line by line and take care of the first four or five lines so that they are not at a home crowd disadvantage. We're going to try and, with our bracketing system, keep our people much within their own time zone as we possibly can. This bracketing system has done that very effectively. We have about 50% more institutions that are either in their own time zone or within one time zone of their place of residence. We think that's a good thing for fans. We think it's a good thing for the crowds. We think it's a good thing particularly for students traveling to the games. There are a lot of reasons why this all makes sense. There are also some challenges with it. It depends a lot on the seeding and where teams fall on the S-curve, because as we go through and assign sites flight by flight, sometimes we run out of options. We do that like we did last year with the five ACC teams on the first four lines. That limits our ability to assign certain teams to certain locations because we don't want people to match up -- people in the same conference to match up before the regional finals. We have a lot of flexibility, but we also have some scriptures -- some prescriptions that keep us from, you know, keep us from putting people as close to home as they possibly can.

BOB BOWLSBY: That's correct. Any first and second round can feed into any regional.

BOB BOWLSBY: Good question. We will analyze that 8-8 to see who it's against, both the wins and the losses. More than anything else, we're probably going to go back and look at the portion of the schedule over which they had some control. They or anybody else. This is a general statement; it doesn't pertain to Virginia Tech necessarily. But the section of the schedule that you have control over is your non-conference schedule. It isn't intended that everybody has to play all their games against Top 25 opponents. But you also don't have to play them against the bottom 125 either. We're going to look at the non-conference schedule very carefully and look at the portion of the schedule over which the institution can have some control. I would draw your attention to the committee's action a few years ago when Georgia got in with a 16-12 record, and the No. 1 non-conference RPI in the country, and Alabama was left out, as I recall it, a 23-win season and a non-conference strength of schedule over 300. I think those are -- the committee has consistently dealt with issues of strength of schedule in that way, and those kinds of things are the sorts of things that break ties when we get down to deciding who is in and who is out.

BOB BOWLSBY: That's exactly right. The thing you need to remember with conference records is those conference games are no different than any other games on the schedule. They happen to be against a conference opponent. It's a win, it's a loss. They have a site. It is what it is. Those games are really -- the conference record is really just a representation of what their body of work was in those 16 games. Other than the fact they don't have control over them like you do a non-conference record, those games are just one game on the schedule, just like every other game is.

BOB BOWLSBY: We're not going to weight the league tournaments, those games, any more heavily than we weight any other single game on the schedule. It is accurate to say that we are looking for teams that are playing well in the second half of the season and who may be playing their best basketball during this half of the season. That doesn't mean you can ignore what occurred in the first half. But you're certainly looking to put the best 34 at-large teams into the tournament, and the conference tournament games are important parts of that.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, I don't want to get into talking about --

BOB BOWLSBY: It's 16 games and 16 wins. It's like going undefeated in your non-conference. It's the same thing. Those games count the exact same.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, we do look at injuries, there isn't any question about that, especially injuries where a student athlete is entirely unable to participate. So we're going to look at the outcome of those games carefully. It affects seeding and it can affect access to the tournament. I would draw your attention to a decision by the committee a few years ago relative to Cincinnati, Kenyon Martin was injured at the end of the year. It was known he wasn't going to be able to play in the NCAA tournament. Clearly they weren't the same team without him. They ended up as a two seed instead of a one seed. We have always taken those things into consideration. A little more difficult situation is the one where a student athlete may be injured but goes ahead and plays anyway. Who knows if they're 75 percent or 50 percent or 20 percent. Those things are a little more difficult to quantify. But we take all of those things into consideration. There's somebody that has the surveillance on every one of our conferences, all 31 of them, and the independents. So that committee member will come into our meetings and will provide a very exhaustive report on that conference. Injuries, team circumstances, those kinds of things will all be taken into consideration. There isn't a cutoff on RPI, as I mentioned because we don't use it that way. But it is reflective, in a general sense, of what the body of work is. So we're certainly going to look at it. I wouldn't say that it's a tool that we use to make cut decisions.

BOB BOWLSBY: No, we don't do that. But we take into account the outcome and then spend some time talking about whether or not it's reasonable to think that the absence of that player may have made a difference in it. You know, it's a mitigating factor, I think, if you can put it that way.

BOB BOWLSBY: All of them.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, I certainly didn't intend to say that the first line was resolved or that it was going to be easy. But I think there are some teams that have distinguished themselves throughout the year that are good possibilities to end up on line one. Now, there's still a lot of basketball to be played. As I say, I don't think any of it is fait accompli at this point. Between lines two and eight, it's going to be pretty muddy. We've got a lot of work to do there. That really was my only point. I don't think -- just because of the gravity of the decision, I think line one is always important. And it's always difficult for that same reason.

BOB BOWLSBY: I think we are in a position to evaluate that. We know who's playing well and who has had a good year and who hasn't. In some measure, you can look at it and say there was an attempt made. On the other hand, you can also tell when an attempt hasn't been made. I think that ours is a sophisticated enough process that we can work our way through that a little bit.

BOB BOWLSBY: I think Alabama is a good example. They have significantly upgraded their schedule. They now play a very representative pre-season schedule. You know, yeah, I think Gonzaga has played a terrific pre-season schedule, has heard the message. I think a lot of other people have, too. Plus I think this year there were probably a few more of the teams from major conferences that went out and played some people. That's been encouraging. There are financial reasons why some of the major programs aren't going to lose a home game in order to go out and play a mid-major on the road and risk not only getting a knot on the head but also losing a game that was a substantial amount of money. I think we have sent a consistent message during the time I've been around and involved in this process, that those games over which you have some local control, you need to play a representative schedule. And for an institution that has a 150 RPI, that may be playing institutions up to 90 and down to 210, it doesn't necessarily mean that you got to go on the road and get your brains beat out playing against the Top 25.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, that's a good question. We sometimes will begin the seeding process even before we have completed the selection process. It just depends. We get to the point on Sunday quite frequently when there are aspects of the process you just can't move any farther forward. It also happens to us on Saturday usually. We just get to the point where we're sort of spinning our wheels and we're not able to move forward on any additional selections, for instance. At that point we may talk about seeding and begin the process of discussion. Maybe we get partway through it, and we have four or five teams that we think ought to be there and we say, "Well, you know, we'd like a little more information before we make that decision." It doesn't necessarily occur that all the teams are selected and then the entire S-curve is completed and then the bracketing takes place. We're working, for instance, we have a subcommittee that works on the bottom four lines of the tournament. It always surprises people to hear that we spend as much time and effort on the bottom four lines making sure those placements on the S-curve are correct as we do on the top lines frequently. I just think you don't get held up by it because if you begin to struggle with it, you move on to something else.

BOB BOWLSBY: I think it will look very similar to the field we've had in the past. I think that some things like bracket busters and some of those kinds of things, some of the exempt items, the exempt contests, have allowed institutions of all levels to play each other more than they've played in the past. But, you know, this is not a change in a system. This is a relatively minor refinement to the same allocation of priority that we've had before. It's the same 25, 50, 25 process we've had in the past. We just refined it in a way that we feel gives us a little bit better information. It is not a radical change. There are some situations where the RPI, with the weighted version, varies from the RPI of the original. But what that's intended to do is to tell us some things about what's going on. We just continue to view it exactly as we have before, and I don't see it having any sort of profound effect on the field because it's not a tool that ever has a profound effect on the field.

BOB BOWLSBY: The answer is yes. We always are looking for critical match-ups. I think it's particularly true in terms of seeding. You may say, "Hey, that looks like that's going to be the match-up we're going to see in Conference X on Saturday afternoon. If this one wins, Institution A wins, I probably got them on the three line, and if Institution B wins, I probably got A on the four line, and B on the three line." Those things happen. It's especially true of, you know, teams that have met and maybe split during the season.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, in all honesty, that's probably the first setup for us to try and get ourselves out of trouble on Sunday evening. But I think there is more parity in college basketball right now than any time during the five years that I've been involved with the basketball committee. I also think that the college game is the best that it's been in a long time. I just think this is going to be a terrific NCAA tournament. The better competition there is, the better balance there is, the tougher our job is. The selection process is a little like the block charge call. Somebody is going to be unhappy on one side of the issue or the other. Unfortunately, we have to get it to 65 teams and put the best 34 at-large teams in there. Somebody's going to get in and somebody's going to get out. That automatically means that there's going to be some controversy with it. In four trips down the path as a committee member, the scenario we had has always been the same: we have seven teams chasing three spots, some of them are fifth or sixth place teams in major conferences, some of them are runners up in non-major conferences, and we have to go through a process by which we discriminate among those teams and determine which of those are the most deserving and which ones are the most likely to come in and play well in the tournament. It's an excruciating process. I can't say it any other way. I think that's why you hear the same thing from chairs every year. As C.M. Newton likes to say, you can play yourself out of a bad seed, but you can't play yourself into the tournament. Those last three or four teams that go in are very, very difficult decisions.

BOB BOWLSBY: Oh, we will start that process tomorrow evening when we put in our initial ballots. We will talk about them off and on throughout the weekend. Sometimes we get a group of eight, and we say, "Hey, anybody want to propose that one of those doesn't look like the other seven?" We might vote somebody off. On the other hand, we might just go through and continue to whittle it down. It's not the sort of topic that we just take up all of a sudden at the last minute. We're talking about that and shaping our thinking on it all weekend.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, we certainly wouldn't send more than two conference teams to the same site. So it would depend a little bit on who else may be sent there. But I don't think anybody would reject out of hand that that sort of thing could happen. On the other hand, it just depends on who is in and where they are on the bracket. You know, it's very much -- there's some science to it, but there's also an art to it. Mr. Hancock, who is with me here, is the chief bracketologist on putting the thing together. It's a process that's been refined and improved over the years. There's just no way to predict where anybody's going, except to say our rule of thumb is we're going to try to keep people as close to home as we can.

BOB BOWLSBY: They tend to be situations where those three criteria I mentioned are in play, institutions that have had good success or poor success playing on the road, those that have attempted to go on the road and play, and those that haven't defended their home floor. Not defending your home floor, you're more highly penalized than you were in the past with this refinement. It is specifically intended to reflect those that are doing a good job in those three areas and those that are doing a poor job in those three areas.

BOB BOWLSBY: It's helped people that go on the road and play well while they're there. It's helped people -- it hasn't hurt people who defend their home floor.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, some of them are quite a ways off. I don't know what we can do to correct the misinformation. We try and have it out there. There's actually been some talk about putting the RPI that we use out during the season. We haven't taken that step yet. I don't know if we will. We've had some discussion about it. I think we've tried to make our processes as transparent as they can be. In fact, all of the principles we use for selection, seeding and bracketing are available on the NCAA's website. Relative to the number of teams in the league, I have never heard any discussion at a committee meeting about the number of teams in a league. We don't budget a certain number. We don't get concerned over how many there may be. We just evaluate the teams based upon how they stack up against others within their league and those from other leagues. It is what it is. However many get in is what get in. Similarly, we don't worry about somebody having the lowest number they've had in a period of time. We're going to do the best job we can of putting institutions in regardless of their conference affiliation.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, I would say that whoever said that is not paying attention. There's a lot of basketball to be played. While Illinois has had a terrific season, I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that they or anybody else is a No. 1 seed. Once we put those people on the bracket, we will assign the sites. But they're one of the contenders. I wouldn't draw any conclusions in advance of the process because there's a lot of basketball to be played around the country this weekend.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, I can't explain why theirs are different than ours. All I can tell you is the one we use is ours. What was your question there?

BOB BOWLSBY: I'm sorry. I don't have the complete list in front of me. They certainly had a terrific year. I think every team in that league has double-digit wins. That kind of balance certainly bodes well for their conference RPI. Of course, they've got two at the top that are -- that have had more than 20 wins. Yeah, they're benefited by their balance, but I don't know what their number is off the top of my head.

BOB BOWLSBY: Yes.

BOB BOWLSBY: You have to remember that the conference RPI is a reflection of what the teams have done, what the teams they've played have done, and what the teams those people they've played have done. That's the essence of the RPI. The reason they're rated as high as they are is because they've got a number of teams that have impressive resumes, and that's who those other people in the league have to play against every day. As I said earlier, it really doesn't matter if they're conference games or non-conference games. It's just a matter of fact that the people with the around .500 records, they've had to play all 16 of their league games against high-quality opponents. We're going to go through and evaluate those on a game-by-game basis. It really doesn't matter whether they were conference games or non-conference games; they're just 16 games on their schedule.

BOB BOWLSBY: No. We have good wins and we have -- I suppose we actually honestly have bad wins, as well, things that look like they should be more one-sided than they are. We don't spend a lot of time looking at margin of victory or margin of defeat. You know, when you go on the road and play a quality opponent and you play them tough or you take them to overtime or you do some things that people are impressed with, that certainly bears on our decisions. So there are -- one of the things that each of our committee people who are doing their reports, we go around and they'll distribute their written reports, but they'll also go through and do an oral synopsis of their reports. One of the things they'll report on is their best wins and their best losses. There are certainly different quality losses just as there are different quality wins.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, they would have been unique, wouldn't they among teams (laughter)? You know, my only point is, I'm not going to prejudge where anybody is going to end up on the bracket. I think we've got multiple games to be played. I'm only prepared to leave it at that.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, nobody goes in based upon their numbers, I can assure you of that. It's one of the things we look at. It's never used that way. What you just described in terms of how you resolve it, sometimes that's what it comes down to. Sometimes it's the subjective judgment of the collective 10 of us. We're looking at it and saying, "We got two teams and we got one spot." You look at their team sheets, you look at their nitty-gritty, you look at what they've done in their league and outside their league, you look at how they've scheduled, you look at where they've played and how they've done on the road, you take how they did in their last 10 games, those kinds of things. You just can't decide on that basis. We may look at somebody who watched them a lot and say, "Which one of these teams?" Sometimes it's so close that the only thing there is available is our collective intuition as to which team is the best. That's the subjective aspect of it that I don't think we ever want to do without because it is also the place where the passion and the commitment to doing things right for the tournament comes into play with regard to the committee.