How To Reform The NCAA Selection Committee
It’s not that difficult and it would certainly make things more credible.
With UNC’s resounding 95-68 win over San Diego State Tuesday night, the questions about UNC’s inclusion in the 2025 NCAA Tournament should be over, with one exception: Bubba Cunningham’s conflict of interest. As DBR co-founder Boswell believes, the proper thing to Cunningham to have done was to either step down as committee chair or decline the bonus he got when UNC, the last team in, made the field. West Virginia governor Patrick Morrisey, who said UNC’s inclusion was “corruption at the highest level,” wouldn’t be happy but that seems like a good solution to most reasonable people (he’s probably not happy again since West Virginia just lost their coach to Indiana).
There have been a lot of questions and comments about the way the selection committee works, but there’s an easy solution that most people could live with: let coaches make the selections.
And by coaches, we mean retired coaches.
The current committee is made up of 12 athletic directors and conference commissioners.
Consider the group of potential candidates below for the committee. The beauty of this is that while the current model protects the interests of the various conferences, in this system, the only thing that would matter would be being good - and who would know better who is worthy than these guys?
Cut the actual committee down to about 8-10 if possible and treat it much like Mike Krzyzewski had the Olympic team set up, where the primary guys were obvious but the rest were up to speed if they were for some reason needed.
Then the others, who have been watching and scouting, are ready to step in seamlessly.
Once you get the automatic qualifiers, throw out every metric except for strength of schedule and trust the most experienced professionals to put together the best possible field - and seed it appropriately.
No offense to Bubba Cunningham, Keith Gill or anyone else on the committee, but as far as we know, the only person on the committee with coaching experience is Stu Jackson.
Why not just end the controversies, as much as possible anyway, and use the most knowledgeable people to set the field? Imagine how much better these people would be at it.
- Mike Krzyzewski
- Jay Wright
- Roy Williams
- Jim Boeheim
- Jim Larranaga
- Tony Bennett
- Bob Hurley, Sr.
- Bill Carmody
- Cliff Ellis
- Bill Fischer
- Leonard Hamilton
- Bobby Cremins
- Bo Ryan
- Pete Gillen
- Steve Donahue
- Fran Dunphy
- Fran McCaffrey
- Mike Montgomery
- Lon Kruger
- John Beilein
- Tom Crean
- Bob McKillop
- Mike Jarvis
- Homer Drew
- John Thompson III
- Tubby Smith
- Bruce Weber
- Bob Huggins
- Jim Calhoun
- Gary Williams
- Ben Howland