The Selection Committee’s Trade-Offs in Creating the Tournament Field

In this chapter, we focus on the process by which the field for the Division I basketball tournament is created, paying particular attention to the Selection Committee, the group of representatives tasked with choosing over half of each season’s tournament field. The Selection Committee has a unique set of powers within the world of sports, as no other sporting event of the size of the Division I championship relies on the discretion of a committee to create its tournament field and draw. Since 1975, the year in which at-large bids were granted to teams, the Selection Committee’s power has grown steadily with the size of the tournament because it has been responsible for a larger share of the tournament field. With this power, the committee has, unsurprisingly, given resource-rich conferences priority for at-large bids into the tournament. Given the compensation structure of the Basketball Fund, the Selection Committee’s bias toward resource-rich teams has allowed the collective resources of the tournament to be consolidated further by resource-rich teams, an outcome consistent with the NCAA’s historical distaste toward finding ways to enhance competitive balance.