NCAA basketball committee faces tough task in picking tournament field

It's still more than a month until Selection Sunday, but members of the NCAA Division I men's basketball committee are warming up this week with a test bracketing exercise for what the panel's chairman said will be perhaps the toughest process it has ever faced.

Speaking Wednesday on a conference call with reporters, Xavier athletic director Mike Bobinski said that the current basketball season has produced "an incredibly competitive field at this point in time" but that the committee doesn't react to teams on a day-to-day basis, only their work over a full season.

That being said, he knows the committee will have its hands full with seeding and bracketing in time for the March 17 announcement of the NCAA field.

"I think our job will be as challenging, maybe even a little bit more so than years gone by from a seeding perspective," Bobinski said. "It appears that we're going to have a lot of teams that look and feel alike. But that's OK. It's a challenge that we'll be prepared for as a committee."

Bobinski said each of the 10 committee members is assigned to monitor seven conferences from the beginning of the season. This week, the committee is reviewing conference monitoring reports and practicing the selection and seeding of teams with a bracketing exercise.

One of the sites for the first weekend of second- and third-round games in the NCAA tournament is the Wells Fargo Center. Bobinski said the committee once again will assign the top four seeds in each region to the closest sites to their campuses.

"When you protect the first four lines, it becomes a little problematic," he said. "As we get into multiple teams from conferences, we have to avoid crossing them over. We try to separate the first three [conference] teams by region."

Other points made by Bobinski:

He said how Kentucky plays without freshman sensation Nerlens Noel, who tore his left anterior cruciate ligament Tuesday night against Florida, will tell how the committee ultimately judges the Wildcats. "We'll clearly be watching them closely," he said.

He said the committee had a statistician measure the various evaluation tools last summer and found that the Ratings Percentage Index rankings ended up "with the highest level of predictive value." Bobinski added: "That doesn't mean we're going to use it more or less this year."

As Xavier athletic director, Bobinski said he will not be a part of the committee's conversation on the Atlantic Ten Conference.