March Madness Selection Committee

March Madness is an exciting time of year as the nation watches the best teams in college basketball compete for the championship. An invitation to the NCAA Tournament is an honor bestowed by the Selection Committee. Keep reading to learn about how the Selection Committee works and who is on it.

What Is the March Madness Selection Committee?

The NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Selection Committee is a group of ten individuals who are responsible for selecting, seeding, and bracketing the field for March Madness. They are also more commonly referred to as simply the Selection Committee. There is a very similar committee of ten individuals, the NCAA Women's Division 1 Basketball Committee,  that select, seed, and bracket the field for the women’s basketball portion of March Madness.

Who Is on the Selection Committee?

The ten members of each Selection Committee are made up of regional Division I athletic directors and conference administrators. They have each been nominated and chosen to reflect a fair representation of all 32 Division I basketball conferences in the US. Each member must also be elected by the conference they represent and can serve up to five years on the committee.

Selection Committee Roles and Responsibilities

The selection committee must provide an unbiased way of ranking and seeding teams in college basketball. They must choose the 68 teams that participate in March Madness each year. Half of the tournament is made easy for them, with 32 spots filled by teams that automatically qualify for the tournament by winning their conference. That leaves 36 spots that need to be filled by “at-large bid” teams.

The committee goes through a long process that begins even before the college basketball season does. They divide up conferences among themselves to focus on for the regulation season. Every member then watches college basketball games in their chosen conference closely throughout the season in an attempt to get to know as many teams as possible. They then reconvene in February to report on their findings.

There are also rules in place to make sure that there are no conflicts of interest during the selection process. For example, members of a selection committee from a certain conference cannot be in the room while teams from their conference are discussed nor can they vote for teams from their conference.

Selection Sunday

The Tuesday before Selection Sunday is when things start to pick up for the committee. From then until the bracket is released, there are many debates, votes, and discussions of potential scenarios with the members. In those five days, the committee has to finalize the bracket even though basketball is still being played in the form of conference tournaments.

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