Today's Q&a With Chairman Of Ncaa Bracketing/seeding Committee

[Green to the Bone]

Here are excerpts from the teleconference today with Gary Walters, Princeton's athletics director and chairman of the committee.

Interesting points:

-- Postseason tournament performance is very important -- did you hurt or enhance your rep? (good for us)

-- First ballot is due at 11 p.m. tonight

-- Conference membership plays no role (so he says)

-- The bottom quadrant gets just as much respect, time and care as the top (on this I believe him)

-- Performance with people out hurt is a factor (think of two tournament wins w/KD out or feeling poorly)

-- RPI is much less important than most people think (as I suspected).

Here's the partial transcript. The whole thing is at www.ncaa.org.

GARY WALTERS: The compression or the congestion that is evident nationally and within the conferences certainly is going to make our selection and seeding difficult this year. Consequently, I really believe, as I stated the last time we were on the call, that the importance of the conference tournaments, whether or not teams can either embellish or damage their resumes in these tournaments, is going to be an important factor. …Then, finally, this is one of the major points that I made the last time, and that is we have to continue to look at the performance of the teams within the unbalanced schedules of their respective leagues. But, frankly, we also have to look at the unbalanced schedules outside the league. Some teams have been able to fatten up in the pre season or on home games while other teams have had a more arduous path as it relates to their non-conference schedules. Those will be issues that we'll have to probe into very, very carefully.

Q. All the other factors would be?

GARY WALTERS: You know, we're talking about, for example, things that we look at on the committee, which are current rankings by the regional advisory committees of coaches, their Division I record, their overall RPI, their, non conference record, their non conference RPI, their road record, et cetera, et cetera.

Q. A lot of focus so far on the top and middle of the bracket. I wanted to ask about the bottom, specifically what is the process for determining who goes to the opening round game in Dayton?

GARY WALTERS: We have a subcommittee that's assigned to looking at the last quadrant. We pay just as much attention to the last quadrant as we do to the first quadrant. As with any number of things, one of the things that we'll evaluate or what are the overall records against common opponents, how do they do head to head. Once again, looking at any other number of factors. How did they do on the road. There's a very, very careful sort of these teams. Ultimately they get every bit as much attention and respect as the teams that are in the top two or three or four lines.

Understand it's very much a human process. We have 10 different sets of eyes looking at these issues trying to make a determination. At the end of the day, it's the overall consensus of the committee that will determine the outcome.

As I mentioned a number of times, once conference play is over, we consider everybody independent. So when we compare and contrast teams, we're not comparing and contrasting teams on the basis of conference affiliation, we're comparing and contrasts teams on the basis of their body of work. That's the critical issue. Obviously we will, at times, have to take into account what we think might be the overall strength of schedule that might be represented in one conference against another conference, but that's the extent of it. We never discuss the number of teams that might be represented in the tournament itself, or even consider it.

Q. Is it fair to say that people that quote statistics about RPI of conferences, for instance there's one out there that says conferences with the top RPI in the top six I think almost have never had fewer than three teams. That's just purely coincidental?

GARY WALTERS: That would be my guess. You know, I would be reluctant to comment too much on that. I mean, one of the things that you've heard me state last month when we talked, given my own background in the investment business as well as having been in athletics, is that past performance is never a guarantee of future results.

Q. I realize now how much less you all use RPI than we all imagined. Is there any scenario you can imagine where a team that was No. 1 overall in the RPI might not be one of the four No. 1 seeds?

GARY WALTERS: Well, I think to a certain extent you answered your own question. The RPI is a tool. As I like to say, it's basically a general indicator of relative strength, not a precise indicator of absolute strength. One can probably put together any number of quantitative models and come up with different teams that might be No. 1 based on that quantitative model. We really have to, at the end, compare and contrast teams throughout the country based on all the variables we talked about. So the answer to your question is: Sure, we could have a team that's No. 1 in the RPI and not necessarily seeded either No. 1 or even in the first line.