NCAA Tournament Selection Process Explained

With less than four weeks left until 2020 Selection Sunday, this year's March Madness tournament is quickly approaching. We have no idea exactly what teams we'll see, and the process can be extremely confusing for a casual fan.

The field begins with 68 teams, which participate in some form of the Big Dance, including play-in contests. A committee appointed by the NCAA analyzes a vast amount of data to make choices for the first 36 teams; these are the "best at-large" teams. You can follow the AP/Coach's poll to get an idea of what these teams will be.

The NCAA process involves the committee submitting ballots of 36 teams they believe should be put in to the tournament, regardless of whether they win their individual conference tournament. These committee members also submit a separate list of teams they believe should receive additional consideration. If a team gets all but two votes from committee members, they're in the tournament as an at-large team.

Teams which don't hit that threshold, but only lose three votes are put "under-consideration," and the committee votes again under the pool is dwindled down to eight teams. These eight teams are ranked using a point system until four teams remain, and those teams receive an at-large bid. The committee repeats this process until all the at-large spots are filled. The rest of the field is, of course, filled in by auto-bid conference tourney winners, a process which occasionally cuts bubble at-large teams out. If there's an unexpected conference tournament winner, that's bad news for a team that skated in at the back of the at-large process.

The selection process is very secretive, and many college basketball fans don't know exactly who is putting the entire tournament together. But this NCAA committee decides seeding and participants with the goal of making each quadrant as evenly competitive as possible.