If you haven't already seen these pieces from Andy Katz and Pat Forde on ESPN.com, they're worth your time. The NCAA asked some veteran college basketball writers to come to Indianapolis and create a hypothetical field of 65 for the tournament. I always thought the NCAA would do well have a journalist in the meeting room every year, just to deal with the sheer volume of misinformation peddeled by the blowhards on sports radio. For what it's worth, Katz and Forde insist that reputation has very little to do with who comes out of the selection room, but I don't know of any coach who actually believes that. Maybe the sheer volume of basketball coverage alleviates some of the importance of tradition. But in baseball just about everyone believes you need to back-to-back solid seasons if you're a nobody trying to break into the field. And three years ago, a deserving Cal Poly team was left out of the I-AA playoffs in favor of Lehigh (who, the year before, had been the consensus 17th team out of 16).
UC Davis coach Gary Stewart is on the West Regional Advisory Committee for the NCAA tournament. His job is to rank the teams in the region at the beginning of January, the beginning of February and just before the start of the conference tournaments. That's one of the bits of data that the committee has in the room when it sits down to pick the field. Stewart says doing his rankings are an arduous task, one that seems to take much longer than he expects every time he sits down to do it. It doesn't help, Stewart said jokingly, that assistant coach John Lamanna is always hanging around trying to make a case for his Washington State Cougars.
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