In three weeks, the 10-member Selection Committee will gather in Indianapolis to assemble the 68-team tournament bracket. The process will take days, because the ongoing conference tournaments will produce upsets and surprise winners. Teams will play their ways into — and out of — the tournament, and the Committee has to watch all the results. They will have access to mountains of data on every team, rankings from several sources, and enough televisions to be able to watch as many games as time permits. And they will be well fed, too. It’s a big project!

The first task is to select the teams that will make the tournament, narrowing more than 350 teams to just 68. The conference tournament champions will get automatic bids to the Tournament, accounting for 32 slots. The Committee then will choose the 36 best teams from those remaining, which make up the “at large” bids. Most of the time, the first 25 or so at-large teams are obvious, but when you get down to the last eight or so slots it gets difficult. A Committee member cannot be present when a team from their conference is being discussed, voted on, or seeded, to avoid favoritism.

The Committee next has to rank the teams, No. 1 through No. 68. This will guide their seeding process, so it’s possibly the most important part of the process. While they do have a great deal of data to help with this task, they also watch games. These people see a lot of basketball (it’s a job requirement!), so their decisions are formed through a combination of objective data and subjective evaluation. While some rankings are pretty good indicators of how the Committee will rank a team (ESPN’s Strength of Record or SOR is one of the better ones), there is no single stat or ranking system that can possibly cover everything the Committee considers. If there were, there’d be no Committee and no “bracketologists!”

Once the teams are ranked (and it’s a fluid, ongoing process throughout the week for many teams!), the Committee has to place them in the bracket. They are added to the bracket in the order that they’re ranked, and this is critical because the more highly ranked teams will get geographic advantages in where they are placed. The tournament sites change every year. (See this week’s bracket on the OBSERVER website for this year’s sites.) So a higher ranking could mean less travel, both for the team and its fans!

Here’s an example: For awhile, most projections (including mine) had Virginia rated ahead of Tennessee, so UVA was being sent to Columbia and Tennessee to Columbus. The difference in driving distance isn’t too significant, but for the regionals Virginia was sent to Louisville and Tennessee way out to Kansas City. Now that they’ve been flipped in most brackets, their respective city assignments also flipped, and Virginia now has the slightly longer first weekend trip and the much longer second weekend trip (if they get that far). It carries even more importance when determining which school gets sent out west. Lately that’s been Michigan or Michigan State, having to go to the west coast in the second weekend instead of to nearby Louisville or Washington DC.

Placing teams is complicated. Among the top 16 teams (the top four seeds in each region), two teams from the same conference can’t be placed in the same region. This isn’t tough to follow unless there are five teams from one conference in the top 16. They also have rules against conference matchups before the second weekend, which may be impossible to follow when you have nine or 10 teams from the same conference to seed. They “protect” the top 16 teams by not giving their opponents a geographic advantage over them in their first game (so for instance, possible 13-seed Hofstra won’t play in nearby Hartford against a 4-seed) but they also have to try to balance the regions so all are as equally competitive as possible.

And that, in a nutshell, is how it’s done. It’s an imperfect but rigorous process, and despite the occasional inexplicable “snub,” the Committee generally does a great job. The result is the most exciting event on the sports calendar.

Chris LaGrow is an OBSERVER contributing writer. Comments on this article can be sent to sports@observertoday.com. See projected bracket at observertoday.com.