NCAA committee chairman provides insight to selection process

The NCAA Tournament bracket is set. March Madness has officially begun and NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Committee chair Tom Burnett, who also serves as the Southland Conference commissioner, joined CBS Sports to discuss the selection process on Sunday night.

As always, controversy surrounds the selection process as some teams make the field with sub-par resumes and others miss the cut despite a strong contingency promoting their value. During his on-air appearance immediately following the bracket reveal for the NCAA Tournament, Burnett went in-depth on the decision-making process which led to this year’s 68-team field.

“I’m not sure about smooth,” said Burnett. “But there’s always bumps in the road. A lot of that had to do with – we had great basketball this week – and we were watching all the conference tournaments that were going on late into today. We had all sorts of contingencies in place because we knew these conference tournaments were very important and something we needed to keep an eye on.

“Not really any bumps in the road, just a lot of teams that were always under consideration that were playing deep into their tournaments.”

NCAA committee chair on selection process

After receiving a follow-up question about any potential changes made to the bracket on Sunday, as the final conference championships ended, Tom Burnett provided a candid insight on the long meeting.

“By the time we got into bracketing today, we had to look at about 10 different contingencies,” said Burnett. “So that’s essentially 10 different seed lists, 10 different brackets that the committee had to go through. And obviously we had to go through all of the results of today to get the final data points to complete the process and eventually whittle that down to a couple of brackets and then of course the one we released tonight.”

Providing a deeper look at the NCAA Tournament selection process, Burnett revealed one way the job has gotten easier over his time involved.

“I would say we’ve had the benefit of expanding our committee as we’ve spoken about before and that’s been very beneficial,” said Burnett. “A lot more coverage across our conferences and I think that’s been beneficial to the process. And of course, as we’ve talked about before, getting everything back normal with a national tournament is something that is very important to our group. We cant wait to get out on the road this week.”