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Message: [QUOTE="HooperScooper, post: 3855261, member: 10"] [B]CBS[/B]: [I]We almost never see teams one or two wins above .500 receive at-large inclusion, but given how you're tracking the sport now, do you think it's reasonable to forecast there could be teams right near .500 that wind up making the field?[/I] [B]MB[/B]: Hard for me to speculate on that. As I said Saturday [on CBS], there's 1,000 games left and almost all those will be conference games. There are leagues that chose to spend more of their games in-conference this year -- and some were totally in-conference. For the leagues that have traditionally been multi-bid leagues, their résumé will primarily be their conference games, and they may be 10-8, 11-11 or 10-10. That could be a factor where we're having to evaluate those teams that's close to .500 and again, it goes back to a little bit about who you beat, where'd you beat them, opportunities for quality wins and did you take advantage? Those are all important details. The ability to look at common opponents and if there's head-to-heads -- there might be some -- but we lost a lot of nonconference opportunities and that's certainly going to factor into the smaller résumés to the committee. I don't want to get into how that might play out in real time, but I certainly think it will have an impact in our ability to evaluate teams across the board. [B]CBS[/B]: [I]How is the committee grappling with this inevitability of vastly different game totals at the end of the season? One team might wind up having nine or 10 more results than another under consideration in a similar spot. Is that an advantage or disadvantage?[/I] [B]MB[/B]: I don't know that there is a real clear answer on that. It is new territory and clearly every committee member is going to have to look at it through the prism with which they see it. We've had conversations about how difficult that's going to be. Take [URL='https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/teams/STLOU/saint-louis-billikens/']Saint Louis[/URL] for example. They've got a high-quality win over [URL='https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/teams/LSU/lsu-tigers/']LSU[/URL] out of conference. Then all of a sudden they're put in a position where they've not played many conference games and been put on pause, or someone else's put them on pause in their schedule. [URL='https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/teams/MINN/minnesota-golden-gophers/']Minnesota[/URL] has played a pretty full schedule of 21 games, struggling to win on the road, what does that mean to their total résumé as it relates to teams that haven't had the opportunity to go on the road? Those are great conversations. No one will be penalized for being on pause. Sometimes it just doesn't work and we'll do the best we can at trying to find a way to across the span of games to try and find some commonalities and some things that give you a chance to measure one against the other. And ultimately find the 37 at-larges that give you the best field. [URL unfurl="true"]https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/news/court-report-selection-committee-chair-mitch-barnhart-explains-new-ncaa-tournament-seeding-process/[/URL] [/QUOTE]

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