Mr. Willhite Goes to Indianapolis

Everyone knows the NCAA’s offices are in Naptown, which makes it the college basketball capitol of the world. On Thursday and Friday, I’ll be one of 20 media types seizing control of NCAA headquarters to put together a mock men’s basketball bracket.

Together with Columbus Dispatch scribe Bill Rabinowitz, we’ll portray Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith at the selection table. He’s one of the 10 members of this year’s committee that will put together the actual bracket.

I see a lot of folks out there in the media and on the message boards trying to gauge teams’ chances – especially Illinois and Northwestern locally – so I’ll be blogging throughout Thursday and Friday to give an update on the process and those teams’ hopes. My initial thought? Neither team belongs in the field at this juncture. If you want to see Bill’s bracket that he updated on Monday, click here: http://blog.dispatch.com/hoopsscoops/2010/02/bracketology_28.shtml#more

For now, though, here’s a reminder of some guidelines that the mock and real committees will use:

1) Did you know when the real committee is sequestered for five nights on the 15th floor of the Westin Hotel in Indianapolis, hotel staff isn’t allowed in to clean their rooms unless NCAA staff accompanies them? OK, I know that doesn’t affect the bracket, but it indicates the lengths they go to keep people from tampering with the committee. Also, callers to the committee members’ rooms must give a password or they’re denied access. Hint: The password isn’t “Illiniwek.”

2) RPI is the base language. By that, I mean each team’s report breaks down its opponent’s ratings using the RPI. You can see how a team fared against the Top 50 RPI, RPI 51-100, RPI 101-200 and RPI 201-up. You also know the average RPI of the team’s wins and the average RPI of the team’s losses.

3) But RPI isn’t the be-all, end-all. The committee also has access to the Sagarin ratings, the Pomeroy ratings, CollegeRPI.com, RPIRatings.com and the LRMC Rankings.

4) This one surprised me: We’ve been brought up to think that a team’s final 10 games matter to the committee, but that’s on the list of materials that ARE NOT influential. Also on that list: A team’s previous NCAA Tournament performance, Conference RPI and lobbying by/of committee members.

I’ll add one more to that list, because I saw it suggested on some message board or another: the NCAA committee couldn’t care less whether a school comes from a major metropolitan area (and therefore brings a large ratings number) or from a big silo in South Dakota.

More from NCAA HQ starting Thursday.

LW