Bracket drawing is hard

By By Stan Torgerson / sports columnist
March 18, 2003
The bracket announcements by the selection committee were literally still hanging in air when the second guessers on television started asking the inevitable why this and why that questions.
Sorry, but I belong to the "They did the best they could" group of fans.
When you consider there are college tournaments going on literally to the last minute and that the selection committee must have its choices ready for TV at 5 p.m. you get an idea of how hard the job must be. Committee members can't say, "Sorry, we're still arguing. Come back in 30 minutes." Television won't wait and they're paying the big bucks that make this tournament one of the most important sporting events in the world.
The committee gets the brackets well in mind and some school, which never figured until Sunday afternoon, upsets one of the lock-in teams, wins the conference tournament and the automatic bid that goes with it and gives the committee an hour or less to juggle the teams and the brackets while the clock steadily ticks on.
C.M. Newton, the former Alabama coach and Kentucky athletic director, was a member of that committee at one time. We we're at the SEC Tournament and I asked him what it was like to draw up the brackets and try to be fair to all. He told me it was one of the hardest jobs he had ever held in all the years he had been in college athletics. Yes, there are arguments inside the committee. And yes, there are differences in opinion. But no, he said, committee members do not show favoritism to teams in their own conferences. All they want, C.M. said, is to be fair.
As someone who thinks the ultimate championship is between Kentucky in the Midwest bracket and Arizona in the West, I too wish the brackets had not been drawn so those two teams could meet in the semi-finals rather than in the championship game. But both will still have to win four straight against strong opponents to get that far. And a look at the other two brackets, the South and the East shows teams such as Texas, Oklahoma, UConn, defending champion Maryland, Mississippi State, Louisville and Wake Forest, all worthy, all possible champions.
My only really and truly question is how did Alabama get selected? They won their first nine games and then fell apart. The argument from the pundits of the press has always been how you finish is more important than how you start.The better you play at the end is a major element for consideration when the committee discusses who goes and who doesn't. But in a post selection interview the chairman of the committee made reference to the Tide's tough non-conference schedule and said that school had done what the committee suggested everyone should do and that is play a representative early season non-conference schedule instead of a bunch of cupcakes that can only add to your win list without truly measuring your ability. A look at Bama's pre-season schedule shows games with Oklahoma (a No.1 seed), Xavier (a No. 3 seed), Utah (a No. 9 seed) plus the powerhouses in the SEC.
Only Kentucky could match that lineup. The Cats played Michigan State (#7), Louisville (#4), Indiana (#7), Notre Dame (#5) and unranked North Carolina. Nobody else faced a lineup like that.
Auburn, for example, faced just two non-conference teams which made the NCAA Tournament, Western Kentucky, a #13 and South Carolina State, a #16.
Alabama's worthiness is still questionable but I don't get a vote.
As for Mississippi State, they have one hard row to hoe. If they beat Butler, and they should, they catch Louisville next (Rick Pitino said his Louisville team should have been a number one seed) and after that, should they win, almost certainly Oklahoma, the actual number one seed in the East. The committee didn't do them any favors with their five seed in the East.
The Dogs did themselves proud, however, with their play against Kentucky in the finals of the SEC
Tournament. If Mario Austin hadn't missed both free throws in the last couple of minutes, free throws which would have given MSU the lead, there's no telling what might have happened.
But, as my old broadcast partner Lyman Hellums used to say "If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, oh what a Christmas we'd have."
There's going to be a lot of ifs and buts in the next three weeks.