BTO Exclusive: NCAA Women's Mock Bracket

BTO Exclusive: NCAA Women's Mock Bracket

Longtime Basketball Times contributor Wendy Parker delivers a special contribution to BT Online.

When most of the teams in each region had been selected, seeded and bracketed, the doors mercifully opened but no white plume of smoke emanated from NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis. 

At that point, those of us who participated in the women's mock bracket exercise last week were just relieved not to have to look at one more team sheet, not to have to break one more tie in our voting, not to have to make one more case for or against a team dangling on the bubble.

But neither did I feel like a member of the College of Cardinals, having gone through a laborious, if not prayerful, process of doing the best we could. Because when I looked up at the big board to view our handiwork, I thought: 

"Okay, so how do we defend this? How would we explain this to coaches, the media, the public if we were on the real NCAA Women's Basketball Committee?"

Glancing back at some of my notes, and reviewing the detailed committee rules and procedures to try and develop an answer made me want to reach for a bottle of Advil. For every selection, seeding and bracketing decision there are as many, if not more, rationales for each of those choices.

With the vast amount of data, conference reports, injury updates, regional coaches rankings and occasionally impassioned discussion that goes into nearly every vote, the possibilities are infinite. This is what has coaches and reporters shaking their heads on selection day, and after seeing how the process unfolds doesn't mean I won't be surprised when the final bracket is unveiled on March 15. 

Now I know that there will be factors going into those decisions that our mock group never considered. There are complexities and details that we didn't delve into during our condensed eight to 10 hours of work. Obviously there will be updated information, with all conference tournaments having been played out, that we didn't have at our disposal in early February.

The point of having us embedded isn't necessarily to engender sympathy for how the bracket is done or to humble us, although there are those effects, but to demystify the process. But even understanding it a little better is no guarantee that I won't be scratching my head.

And here are the perspectives of notable mock media veterans Mel Greenberg and Mechelle Voepel, as well as coaches at last summer's exercise. I can't say I wasn't warned about what I might expect. (I was interviewed recently about my participation, and here's how you can listen to my conversation with Dave Siegel of the Swishin' and Dishin' podcast.)

What I appreciate even more profoundly is the reaction of another professional colleague attending a previous mock session who threw up his hands and begged for mercy: 

"Just let me out of this room and I promise I'll never write anything bad about the NCAA again." 

Well, repeating that promise isn't any simpler to make than what I and 20 other media representatives and coaches went through over a two-day period. 

(The roll call of bracketeers: Wendell Barnhouse, Big12sports.com; Beth Bass, Women's Basketball Coaches Association CEO; Tony Bleil, Champaign News-Gazette; Jody Demling, Louisville Courier-Journal; Mike Diesenhoef, ESPN; Kris Gardner, KCOH Radio, Houston; Jim Jabir, Dayton head coach; Betty Jaynes, Women's Basketball Coaches Association founder; Milton Kent, Fanhouse.com; Kara Lawson, ESPN; Rebecca Lobo, ESPN; Lee Michaelson, Full Court Press; Jerry Palm, CollegeRPI.com; Carolyn Peck, ESPN; Rick Reeves, Gardner-Webb head coach; Barry Sacks, ESPN; Michelle Smith, Fanhouse.com; Jeff Walz, Louisville head coach; Jerry Lee Woodley, College Sports Report; Gregory Zepeda, KCOH Radio, Houston; and yours truly.)

We were expertly guided by Sue Donohoe, the NCAA's vice president of Division I women's basketball, numbers-cruncher extraordinaire Michelle Perry and the rest of the NCAA women's basketball staff, and committee chairwoman Jane Meyer, senior associate AD at Iowa. They were dedicated to being as transparent as possible, engaged in occasionally vigorous dialogue about their procedures, and answered some tough questions about how and why they do what they do. 

Yet I likened what I experienced to what Winston Churchill said about democracy being the worst political system there is, except for all the others. 

Having 10 college and conference administrators, some with basketball backgrounds, selecting, seeding and bracketing 64 basketball teams after months of preliminary preparations, sequestered from the outside world for four days, making subjective decisions based on largely objective data, is far from ideal. 

And then you think about the alternatives: BCS computer, anyone? It's about putting together a relatively balanced bracket with the format that exists, according to the collective judgment of human beings. The format, and the philosophy that underpins it, isn't going to quell all coaches confounded by what seem to be constantly changing criteria.

And it won't erase the doubts of some journalists -- not just myself -- that an equitable bracket for a national tournament can be achieved while building grassroots fan support at the earliest stages. 

Once teams are given a numerical seed, they can be moved up or down only one seed line to avoid conference conflicts or satisfy geographical preferences. A subregional site without a host school in the tournament may not necessarily get another relatively local team because of these and other factors.

But this comes with some serious risks. Last year, Chattanooga played host to first- and second-round games but instead of getting either Tennessee or Vanderbilt had to settle for Purdue, North Carolina, Charlotte and Central Florida. Local organizers, miffed at the lost revenue without a local draw to promote, vowed they wouldn't bid again. 

The committee's bracketing principles may have been preserved, but a once-eager venue city has been lost, probably for good. The Chattanooga group filed a complaint with the NCAA, and Albuquerque organizers echoed similar concerns. 

Potentially "open" subregional venues this season in Pittsburgh, Louisville, Norfolk, Seattle, Tempe, Berkeley and Minneapolis might make the committee's bracketing and grouping work a bit more flexible. But those host schools could be facing Chattanooga-like situations, with a background of thin "crowds" that ESPN cameras have to work around.

After the exercise, I asked Sue Donohoe, NCAA women's Division I vice president, for an on-the-record comment about what can be done to resolve such conflicts. This is as much a philosophical issue as it is logistical and procedural, and I think it the most vexing component of this process.

"It's one of the important responsibilities of the committee in growing the game," Donohoe said. "But it's not the only one. It's important that fans can come out and travel and support their teams. I think you can stay within the principles and contribute to the growth of the championship. 

"It's not easy and it's not perfect but it can be done."

What our mock group came up with was far from perfect. I cannot discuss too many details of our deliberations or directly quote anyone, as there were candid exchanges about the strengths and weaknesses of teams, and how we assessed their tournament viability. 

I will say (and I Tweeted this during the exercise) that we settled on 16 top seeds that aren't all that different from what's being projected now by the likes of ESPN.com's Charlie Creme and Jerry Palm of CollegeRPI.com, who was in our group. For the purpose of our exercise, our season ended on Feb. 3.

The No. 1 seeds are Connecticut, Stanford, Nebraska and Tennessee; Notre Dame, Duke, Ohio State and Texas A & M are the No. 2 seeds; earning the No. 3 seeds are Georgia, Florida State, Xavier and Oklahoma State; and the No. 4 seeds are West Virginia, Texas, Baylor and Oklahoma.

You might be surprised how much voting takes place on every phase of this process, and how often we had to take tiebreaking votes, sometimes involving more than two teams, to select, seed and bracket teams. And how frequently those votes were interspersed between open discussions. 

For all the talk about how much RPI, strength of schedule and conference finish play into these decisions, they all feed into a "body of work" compendium that matters most. No matter if a team is from the BCS ranks, a mid-major conference or a "one and done" league, they've got to schedule competitive non-conference games, and they've got to win at least a few of them. 

Wins against teams in the Top 50 RPI are crucial, and so are losses to teams below that mark. Where a team wins key games is significant. If a team wins big games at home but can't do it on the road, that doesn't potentially bode well for NCAA play.

How a team plays in its last 10 to 12 games is vital. So is an injury to a key player, a factor that rankles coaches, who are right to ask: Why punish the other players on a team when someone goes down? Yet this can and does alter the quality of a team. 

(As we were meeting, Kansas All-American candidate Danielle McCray suffered a season- and career-ending knee injury. I've got the Jayhawks as a bubble team right now, and McCray's injury, coupled with a previous ACL tear to starting point guard Angel Goodrich, places them on even thinner ice in the toughest conference in the country.)

So having gone through that, it was time to place teams in regions. And guess what? Some obvious local choices didn't necessarily get what they might like. The regionals this year are in Dayton, Memphis, Kansas City and Sacramento, with the top seeds getting geographic priority. A pop-up mileage chart helps the committee make these assignments. 

But even that can't prevent the conference clusters we came up with. In the Dayton regional, the top four seeds came from two conferences: UConn, Notre Dame, Oklahoma State and Oklahoma. And although teams from the same league wouldn't play each other until the regional final -- following yet another rule -- this still chastens me. So does the fact that we shipped not one, but twolocal draws to Kansas City (Nebraska, Ohio State, Florida State and West Virginia) and Sacramento (Stanford, Texas A & M, Xavier and Baylor), respectively. Our Memphis regional contained Tennessee, Duke, Georgia and Texas.

I don't envy the committee's job at all, especially this year, with several power conferences not as strong as in the past and mid-major teams making some serious noise. Good luck finding 33 at-large teams, then blending them with 31 automatic conference qualifiers and placing them in locations that might just have a host school, or a nearby team, in the mix. And be prepared to catch flak from a host that didn't have a nearby team to help it sell tickets.

I really, really do sympathize with the Twister-like balancing acts that will take place. The committee has been saddled with a format that has it handcuffed in several significant ways. It must also try to remove all unnecessary emotion from a process that can affect the livelihoods of coaches and either enable or dash lifelong memories for players and fans. While I'm all for honoring processes and rules, lacking the flexibility of attracting better crowds is still hard for me to reconcile. 

So I suppose that's why they'll continue to send out invitations every year to explain and unravel the mystery of what will always remain a frustrating way to stage a tournament. 

A veteran  sports and Web journalist, Wendy Parker has contributed to Basketball Times since 1991 and spent 25 years in the newspaper industry, primarily for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.