NATIONAL COLLEGE ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION MEDIA CONFERENCE

February 23, 2005

Bob Bowlsby

BOB BOWLSBY: I'd be happy to, Bill, thank you. Greetings to all of you. It's good to be on with you. We kind of look at this as the first step on the road to the Final Four. Wonderful to have you with us. I appreciate you taking the time to be on the call. Relative to the RPI, I think it was a refinement that all of the committee, and I believe the staff as well, felt reflected the current circumstance in college basketball, and that is quite simply that if you take all 328 teams and throw them in a pot, look at all the games they play during the course of a year, approximately two-thirds are decided in favor of the home team. That being the case, we wanted the RPI to be minimally adjusted so that it reflected the difficulty of winning on the road and gave appropriate rewards when teams do achieve wins on the road. Conversely, it also represents a bigger penalty for home teams that don't defend their home floor because if they're among that third that actually loses on their home floor, then it's a bigger black mark than it was before. So far we haven't gone through a selection process using this RPI. As Bill mentioned, it's one of many tools we use. We consider it a blunt object more than anything we would use to discriminate among four or five closely grouped teams. But it certainly is a good way to numerically compare among those that are possibilities for inclusion in the tournament.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, we always take injury situations into account. I would draw your memory to the situation a few years ago with regard to the seeding of Cincinnati, vis-a-vis the injury to Martin. Our task is to put the 34 best teams into the tournament as at-large teams. That takes into account issues of injury. So we're going to look at the entire portfolio of work that Texas or any other institution has put forth, but we also have to evaluate the team they're going to put on the floor when conference tournaments start and when the NCAA tournament starts. In the case of both selection and seeding, we're going to take into account exactly what their personnel package is at the time that we're considering them. While there are some difficulties dealing with injuries, for instance, if somebody had a bad ankle but played in the game, maybe didn't play as many minutes as they had in previous games, it's difficult for us to quantify what effect that may have had on the outcome of that particular game. On the other hand, if a student athlete doesn't play at all or is incapacitated to the point where they can't continue on in the season and there's no question they're not going to be back, we have to take those things into consideration. The institution in question is going to be evaluated on who they're putting on the floor and what they've done with that personnel package compared to what other teams may be that are trying to get into the tournament.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, first let me say there's a lot of basketball left this year. I wouldn't make any presumptions on who's going to be where. I think one thing we have out there this year is a lot of parity. There are a lot of teams that can play. Having said that, one of the things we do with our bracketing system is we try and keep people in region, and that means giving full deference to those teams on the first four or five lines, making sure that they aren't put at a home-crowd disadvantage. Now, it's not absolutely certain if you're the first seed in the entire tournament out of the entire 65 that are seeded, there's no absolute certainty that that team's going to stay in region, but we're going to try to. Last year we had some difficulties because we had five teams from the ACC on the first four lines. It made for some real interesting challenges as to where we assigned people. Partly as a reward, partly as an opportunity for students and fans to see teams play, obviously we aren't going to allow people to play on their home floor. But if we can keep people close to home, and that goes for the entire tournament bracket, if we can keep them close to home, we're going to try and do that.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, you know, in some ways it's more art than science, I'll admit to that. We have to look at when they last played for that particular team and what the team has done since then. I think in large measure you begin the process of reestablishing your portfolio a little bit in the aftermath of losing a critical player. All we have to go on is what that team puts forth leading up into the tournament selection weekend. You know, we look at the last 10 games. We look at how they did on the road, how they did at home. We look at all the same elements. But you're almost looking at two different files on them because what they did before those injuries and what they did after the injuries may not be the same. That isn't to say that you penalize the kids that are still on the team. It wasn't their fault that somebody's not there. But you have to evaluate the team based upon what you know about them in today's environment and what they've done since the time since the departures took place. We really don't have any other way to deal with that.

BOB BOWLSBY: I think it's too early to really answer that question. We'll have a better feel for it after we've had a chance to do some analysis. But I think what it did was, if you defend your home floor and if you also go on the road and win, you're going to benefit from the weighted RPI. I think that's what you've seen with Southern Illinois and some others. Whether or not they're too high or whether somebody else may be too low, in my referencing the weighted RPI chronology that we use, it appears to me that some are benefited by it, some are penalized by it. But we need to get into crunching those numbers a little bit and looking at them during the selection process. I think it really does better reflect what's going on in college basketball, and it gives additional support and strength to the difficulty of going into places and winning on the road. It's just a fact. If it begins to change and that ratio of home wins to road wins begins to evolve, we'll have to evolve our computations along with it. It's just one of the reference tools we use. We'll have to evaluate it just like we do every year after the tournament.

BOB BOWLSBY: What we're going to do first and foremost is we're going to look at each one of those team sheets. It really doesn't matter all that much to the committee if the league is 1-13 in I guess ranked opponents. It is going to make a difference when we look at Kentucky and Alabama and LSU and Mississippi State individually, and how they did against ranked opponents. The league games and the non-conference games, they really don't count any more one over the other. Much is made of you got to have an 8-8 record, you can't get in with 7-9, you got to get in with 8-8. We really don't spend much time looking at that sort of thing. The reason we don't is because we look at each individual game, how they did against each individual opponent, where they played it, when they played it, what the outcome was, what the circumstances were in terms of injuries and the like. That 1-13 is probably going to affect a lot of different schools, but it isn't going to tarnish the SEC, per se, because the SEC is like every other league, it's just made up of its individual members. We're going to look at each one of those games individually and look at each one of those team sheets individually. It's sure better to get wins against ranked opponents than it is losses. But it's not devastation either.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, the weighted RPI is the one that we're going to be using. It's hard for me to speak for all committee members because I don't know exactly what all of them use. But I am sure that committee members are using a variety of numerical computations, including Sagarin and some of the other ones, you know, for comparison sake. I'm sure we'll continue to evaluate. But I want to reiterate, we don't use the RPI as a way to say, "Okay, we're going to look at these three schools, and this one's got a 48, the next one's got a 49, the next one's got 52, so that's the order they go in." It just doesn't work that way. There's a lot more to it than that. Admittedly, there's a fair amount of subjectivity. If it was all about just numerical rankings, we'd just mail it in and we wouldn't have to worry about having selection weekend. I think probably every shred of information we have available to us we'll use. But when we talk about RPI, the weighted RPI is going to be the one that is first and foremost for the committee.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, I think it's an accurate representation of their strength, and I think it's also maybe a representation of a couple of leagues that -- the major conferences that aren't going to get quite as many teams as they have in many years past. We're dealing with a finite environment when we're talking about 65 teams. 34 of those are going to be at-large. It really is a zero sum game in terms of who gets in and who gets left out. To the extent some of the major conferences may not get as many in, it offers an opportunity for some of the mid-majors. On a little more broader perspective than that, I just think there's a lot of parity out there. This year there were a lot of major programs that went on the road to play against mid-majors and lower majors and I think that's a good thing. But there are also a lot of -- there are a lot of good teams out there, there are a lot of good players. It's one of the things that makes the NCAA tournament great from year to year, is that it isn't all the same dogs every year that are at the top of the heap. I think that kind of a comment relative to how many mid-majors make it in, it's a reflection of how good college basketball is throughout the country.

BOB BOWLSBY: Yeah, exactly. It's hard for me to say, "Gee, this is the computational outcome that we will have for that." But they've already got 22 wins, and they're an excellent basketball team playing in a very solid league. I don't think there's any question that they're going to be on the committee's radar screen. It's just going to be a matter of how things go the rest of the way in terms of how they compare with the other people that are candidates to get in the tournament. I think St. Mary's has obviously demonstrated they can play against great competition. We're going to have an opportunity to look at them and compare them to everybody else that's out there. That comparison is going to be based upon what they have in the second half of the season, last 10 games, all those things that I mentioned earlier.

BOB BOWLSBY: Let me answer the second one first. There would not be any guarantee that the successor would come from a historically black college and university. The nominations to the committee come by regional designation and by subdivisional reference. It's highly likely that the replacement would come out of the South and would come out of I-AA or I-AAA. Even that, from year to year, it's not absolutely certain. It is unknown at this point who may be Floyd Kerr's replacement. Relative to his contribution on the committee, from a personal standpoint, I've had the opportunity to travel with Floyd and be at sites with him. I just think it's really an unfortunate situation. He's keeping a very positive attitude about it. But that's not the sort of thing that any of us would like to go through in our careers. However it turns out, he's probably going to have to relinquish the last year of his service, and we're sorry for that. Floyd's a good friend and a good committee member.

BOB BOWLSBY: No, you know, there are situations where we would look at it and say, "Win or lose, that team's going to be a No. 1 seed." There are other situations where two teams would play in the championship, and the winner would be a 2 seed and the loser would be a 3 seed. We try and take into account everything that we have out there in the way of information. Unfortunately, the ACC, the SEC, the Big-10, the Big-12, have got those games on Sunday. Even the two early games can get to be a little bit of a problem for us. People have asked me, "Can't you put together a contingency plan for those outcomes?" The answer to that is, "Sometimes we can and sometimes we can't." This last year we weren't able to put together a contingency plan, and there were some people that were unhappy because we couldn't. As a member of the Big-10, I have to say that I think all of us that are in one of those four conferences go into it with our eyes wide open. We're more than willing to take the big stage and we're more than willing to take the money that goes along with it. There's also a downside to it. We're going to try and take every bit of information that we can into account, and we're going to try and create contingencies when we can. There are those times where that's not possible and we just get to a point where we have to move forward. Sometimes that happens and works well, and sometimes it doesn't. I think that the 6:00 deadline is one that everybody knows about for the selection show. So we're going to do the very best we can to do things just as early as we can. But sometimes it runs into mid afternoon on Sunday before we can get all the seeding finalized.

BOB BOWLSBY: You know what, I've got enough problems trying to get the thing seeded, bracketed and selected. I don't know that I'd care to venture into the BCS. I've heard those same discussions. I think the best part about the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Committee, the people that have been involved in it in the five years that I've been there have done everything in their power to avoid both the reality and the perception of any sort of favoritism. They work very hard at it. I have no doubt that if the BCS decided to begin implementing a similar circumstance and had similar staff support and had similar tools at its disposal, I have no doubt that it could be a very functional system. But that's for others to decide.

BOB BOWLSBY: It's a very good question, and I think your perception of the committee's position is right on target. You may remember that year that Georgia got in and Alabama got left out. Alabama had, as I recall, 22 or 23 wins. They also had a very weak non-conference schedule. It was in the low 300s, as I recall. We really are not trying to get everybody scheduled against Top 25 programs. What we really look at is how do you go about scheduling on those elements of the schedule where you have some control over it. Now, there may be situations where you don't have control over your non-conference schedule. The Big-10 ACC Challenge is a game that we don't have much control over in our league, the two conference offices put that together. Having said that, there's probably another 12 games in the pre-season that you have as an institution some control over. If you're a mid-major, I don't think it's absolutely essential that you go out and play all Top 10 teams and get your brains beat out. But what you do have control over is playing teams that are within 50 positions above you in the RPI or within 50 positions below you in the RPI, and get credible competition in the non-conference level. Those kinds of things are things we look for. If you've got a team that had all kinds of control over their schedule and chose not to play anybody that was above them in the RPI, then that tells us something. If you see somebody that has a relatively solid conference RPI and their non-conference schedule is like Alabama's was, then that tells you something else. To Alabama's credit, and Coach Godfrey's credit they went out and really stepped up their non-conference schedule last year and the year before. That's the message we've been sending, is, "You need to go out and play people." If you're a mid-major, that doesn't mean you've got to play the entire ACC and the entire Big-12 in order to get the committee's attention. But you do have to play somebody other than all teams that are below .275 in the RPI.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, as difficult as it is to judge where they fall against each other, the typical situation we get into at the end of the selection process is that we have four or five of those mid-majors that we were talking about a minute ago, and three or four teams like the ones you just described from one conference and maybe a couple from another conference, we've got three spots left in the tournament. How do you evaluate among all of those? That's when the committee really gets to grinding. You've described what will be a very difficult situation for the committee as we go forward. The only thing I can tell you is that I have great confidence in the group's ability to sit down and scratch and crunch the numbers and look at tape and watch games and those kinds of things. What you've described is extremely difficult. We seldom get easy calls on that sort of thing. When you start comparing them to others around the country, it gets all the tougher. That's one of the things that we really wrestle with during selection weekend, I don't think there's any question about it. I think all of us are looking at it and say, "Gee, I hope that clears up a little bit before we have to deal with it." But if it doesn't, you've accurately identified a situation that will require a lot of time on the part of the committee in order to get it right.

BOB BOWLSBY: No, I don't think so. I don't think it's outlived its usefulness. But I think you have to remember what its utility was intended to be. I think much is made of the RPI, especially from this point forward. You don't see a television report on any game that's coming up without having some RPI representations. The committee has talked till we're blue in the face that this is just one of many tools. It happens to be a tool that's more widely bantered around and talked about. But the fact of the matter is it serves a role, it serves an enhanced role now that it's been refined a little bit. I think it's a better tool. But it's not a predictive tool. It's not a sharp, precision object or instrument. It's a blunt object. It's used in that way. We don't use the RPI in the way that most of you would use it or that television commentators would use it. We use it as a point of reference. We use it as an end result of a variety of other computations that we use. But we've got all kinds of other numerical measures that we use. To us the RPI is a tool, but it's not -- it is filling its role very nicely. But I don't think we put as much emphasis on it as everybody else does.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, I don't know that I could characterize how often it happens. But that certainly is a situation we get to. We all have satellite dishes. We've all been watching games since early December. We've seen a lot of different teams play. We'll see a lot more teams play as we go forward during selection weekend. At some level we are going to look at them and say, "You know what, this team may not have as good of numbers as this team, but I can tell you, you don't want to draw this team in the tournament." That comes into the some of the subjectivity that I think the committee does a very good job of. We draw upon some of the former coaches that are in the room. We draw upon our staff. We've got excellent, excellent people on the NCAA staff that arm us with every tool we can possibly imagine. I just think that when it gets right down to it, you get to those last three teams or so, it's really getting tight, sometimes somebody will look up and say, "You know what, out of these three, this is the one you don't want to play in the tournament because they're really good." Sometimes when you get to the point where you can't slide a piece of paper between them or among them, sometimes it's intuition.

BOB BOWLSBY: Yeah, it's a very good question. We do look at those very carefully. The staff arms us with every conference schedule, who has one place, who has no place. There are a number of different models out there as to how these larger conferences put together their in-season conference competition. You really need to be careful because one 8-8 may not be the same as another 8-8 in the same conference. One team may have played most of their games against the top half of the league, and the other team played most of their games against the bottom half of the league. Sometimes there's no head-to-head competition to draw on. We have to be very careful in looking at conference schedules. As I mentioned earlier, each of those are taken -- each game is taken on its own merits. But to use my league, the Big-10, as an example, if Iowa didn't play or only played Michigan State, Wisconsin and Illinois once, that would make a huge difference in what our portfolio looked like. On the other hand, if you've got somebody that played all of those teams twice, it's a different package. And that same thing could be said about any league in the country. We have that at our disposal. We look at it very carefully, just to make sure that we're always comparing apples with apples. Unless you're playing exactly the same schedule, that is to say a double round-robin or whatever, you need to put some study into just exactly what's going on in each league.

BOB BOWLSBY: No, I don't think so. I wouldn't care to characterize it that way at this point in time. I mean, there's an awful lot of basketball to be played. I just think that any prognosticating along those lines would be premature. But I think, as I said, there's a lot of parity out there and there are a lot of people that can play. You know, there are a lot of difficult home venues among mid-majors. As was mentioned, it's sometimes hard to get the big guys to come in there and play. But you better be ready when you do because those teams are good enough to beat you. I think what you've seen from some of the mid-majors in the past couple of tournaments would be enough to satisfy you that those people can really play. You know, I don't know that it's a breakthrough year. You mentioned the Missouri Valley, they've had three teams in recently. I don't know if it's a breakthrough year. I think it probably varies from league to league. But there are a lot of teams that can really play out there, and I expect that they'll be represented in the NCAA tournament pool.

BOB BOWLSBY: It's going to depend entirely on how the bracket goes together. That will get done on Sunday morning probably and early afternoon on Sunday. There's no way to predict that at this point in time. As I mentioned earlier, we're going to keep people close to home if we can. It's not inconceivable that there could be two No. 1 seeds in the same first and second round. They would be going to different regionals, perhaps. But with the system we use now for site selection, site designation, that sort of thing can happen. Our rule of thumb is we're going to try and keep people close to home. We're going to try and avoid having them be at a home-crowd disadvantage. But there's no way to know how that's going to fit together until we get into selection weekend and get to Sunday morning.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, we've been watching games since early in the year. We're certainly looking for teams that are progressing. If you're better in the second half of the season than you are in the first, you got a better chance of getting in the tournament and being seeded high than you do if you were doing it the other way around. If you were really bad early and really good late, that's a positive. If it's reverse, it's a negative. We take those trends into consideration. But that would be the only way we would take it into consideration. The age of the players, year of eligibility, those kinds of things, we don't look at in any way, shape or form. If performance is improving over the course of the year, especially as we look at the conference tournaments, last 10 games, sure, we're going to take that into consideration. But it wouldn't necessarily be as a result of what year the kids were in school.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, that's all going to go into the hopper. We're going to take all of those things into consideration. You know, if it comes down to three institutions, two of them have played tough non-conference schedules and also tough conference schedules, and one has played a soft schedule and not had a tough conference schedule, that creates an advantage for those two schools that have gone out and played. As I said earlier, the things that you have control over in your schedule are who you have in the non-conference. We can tell by trends in non-conference scheduling as to whether or not people made any effort at all to go out and schedule teams. But anybody that's ever coached the game knows that there are some years that you really do want to start with a softer schedule because you've got young players or untested players. We don't get into taking those things into account except insofar as we compare among closely grouped bunches of teams, then non-conference RPI could come into play.

BILL HANCOCK: Thanks, everybody. Before we leave, just got a couple of announcements that will be of interest. First of all, a reminder, this is in response to the question about teams from a conference going into a site, that no more than two teams from any conference can be assigned to a particular site. I think the question was in regards to Charlotte, the ACC. It's the same at all sites. The way the bracket lines out, no more than two from a conference can go to any site. On a little different topic, I want to remind everybody there is a different conference call tomorrow. It's from the NCAA. It's a background session for the media regarding the Academic Progress Report that will be announced at the end of February. For those who are interested, that call begins at 4:15 eastern time tomorrow. Again, that's 4:15 eastern time tomorrow. The call-in number for that APR call is 800-289-0569. The confirmation is 7578684. I also want to remind you there is a replay of today's conference that will be available until March 5. The number for that is 402-280-9026. Also we will be able to email a transcript of today's conference to you, if you wish. If you'd like to receive the transcript of today's call, you can send an email to BHancock@NCAA.org. The next call will be 3:00 eastern time on Wednesday, March 9. The phone number for that one is the same. Then Bob's call on Selection Sunday will begin at 7:00 eastern, same phone number. Also there will be a wrap-up call this year at 3:00 eastern time on Monday, March 14. Again, we appreciate everybody being with us and we look forward to visiting with you again on March 9.