Mike Bobinski reflects on NCAA selection chairman experience
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When NCAA selection committee chairman Mark Hollis and his group convene in the next few days to choose the Field of 68, Purdue's athletic director, Mike Bobinski, will know exactly the challenge they'll be taking on.
Bobinski served as the selection committee chair for the 2012-13 season, holding the final say on a field that he said might have been abnormally cut and dried.
Below, Bobinski reflects on the experience.
GoldandBlack.com: Describe your experience as the committee chair.
Bobinski: "My experience was one of the greatest professional opportunities I think I've ever had. It was a unique undertaking. There's 10 of us on the committee and we get tremendous support from the staff in Indianapolis from the NCAA, but also from all the different conference offices. There's lots of different people who play a role in that. People look at it like you get together for a couple days in Indy and just pick the teams. But really it's a season-long and, really, year-long process.
"I was on the committee five years and chaired it my last year. After five years of doing it, you see lots of different things and every year that group of 10 changes a little. There's a different dynamic each year; someone new is in charge each year. It's all different, but the process of trying to analyze teams to be as informed as you can be, it's long. The bracket gets announced Sunday at 6, but the committee arrives in Indy on Tuesday. This is not a two-day thing. It's an intense five-and-a-half days, the culmination of lots of thought and lots of analysis, intense conversations over details. Everyone comes out differently. Every one of the 10 members has their own style, their own way of analyzing and evaluating teams. That's the beauty of the process. It's not a quantitative exercise. It certainly wasn't for me. Then the formation of the bracket is much more a mechanical process, but the selection of the at-large field is really where the conversation and the process takes hold. It's fascinating.
"People want to buy into there being some mysterious way of crafting the bracket. None of that stuff is true at all, I promise you. There are such great pains taken to stick to the process, to stick to the procedures in a way you can never question the process, the integrity, the ethics. I can tell you that my five years did nothing but convince me of that. Is it always going to turn out 100-percent with what everybody would like it to be? Of course not. Never. But I can tell you no one's cooking the books or doing it in a way that's not above board. It's the highest level of integrity and thought, because everybody in that room recognizes the fact that the chance to play in the NCAA Men's Tournament is an unbelievable opportunity. For the teams that get that chance, they've earned it and you want to make sure you've placed the teams in the bracket who've earned it. Then, you know the teams you don't select are crushed. There's always that next team who'll say, 'We're better than that team, we should be in there,' and we take that very seriously. Many of those people in the room have had teams in or out in any given year, so they know they're making important decisions there. Nobody takes those selections lightly. It's just trying to get to the best solution every year."
GoldandBlack.com: There's a lot of black-helicopters stuff out there on social media every year.
Bobinski: "That's complete and utter nonsense, total nonsense. I know it. I sat in that room for five years and saw it all. I know how hard we work to try to get to the right solution. The rubber really hits the road on Saturday night. That's when you make the last selections to the field, those last three, four, five teams that get in. You can cut the tension in the room, because everybody understands the focus and eyeballs that'll be on those decisions. The agreement, disagreements and arguments over those last few teams will be intense. That's the beauty of the tournament too. If people didn't care and didn't debate who got in and who should have gotten in, it wouldn't be the event that it is.
"It's taken very seriously and there's a very mechanical voting process that makes sure nobody gets in just because somebody got up and made a great impassioned plea in the room and then it's a show of hands and they're in. It doesn’t work that way. It's a very repetitive, iterative voting process where you have to get X number of votes to get in the field and if you don't get those votes, we keep voting until someone gets them. That's what folks who haven't gone through a mock exercise or taken time to know the process don't really understand. But I have great confidence in the way it's done, having been through it five years.
GoldandBlack.com: So who's ultimately judge and jury?
Bobinski: "At the end of the day, it was ever a tie, it would be the chairperson who'd ultimately be the tiebreaker, but in my five years, we were never unable to arrive at a consensus. We always had the required number of yes votes around the room. All but two of the eligible votes is the standard, and the number of eligible votes can be less than 10. If it's your team if there's an affiliation — if you're a commissioner and it's your league — you can't vote. It eliminates that personal bias. So you might only have seven or eight votes at times. … That's another thing I don't know if people understand, that you can't vote for your own team, you can't speak on your own team. I was the A.D. at Xavier and I never once uttered a word about Xavier. I didn't speak the name. I was out of the room when they discussed Xavier."
GoldandBlack.com: How does the process start?
Bobinski: "You start with the universe. You have your automatic qualifiers, then the list of teams that the committee agrees should be on the list for at-large consideration, for 36 at-large spots these day. It starts with probably 60-75 teams probably, and you just start to cull through those teams. You end up with a starting pool that's probably twice the size of what you'll end up with. You just vote your way through it, and all you need is two votes to get on that consideration board, but sometimes that's all a team gets, just those two votes. They may not get another vote the rest of the process."
GoldandBlack.com: What's more difficult, picking the field or seeding the field?
Bobinski: "I think picking the field is the most important thing. Getting the right teams in the tournament, to me, was Priority No. 1. If you end being a 6 or a 7, you can play your way out of a seed you're not happy about but you can't play your way out of not being in the tournament. Getting the teams in the tournament that belong in the tournament was the first priority for me.
"The seeding process becomes a hair-splitting exercise. Usually your top four seed lines kind of stand out, where you can pretty easily say that those are the best teams at the high end, then you have to figure out the low end, but it's in the middle where it becomes this unbelievably murky situation. The debates — they beat this team, but lost to this team — can play out over and over. With seeding, if I recall, we put teams in the tournament starting Wednesday, then we'd begin seeding right away with the best teams as early as Wednesday night, then you go back and do it again on Thursday, on Friday, on Saturday. It becomes incredibly repetitive. You'd have teams on what we called 'the elevator' who'd move up and down. And we'd seed 1 through 68, then figure out the bracket. It's not, 'This team feels like a 4 seed so they should be a 4.' It's very pain-stakingly detailed."
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GoldandBlack.com: As a member of the committee, what resonated with you most when evaluating teams?
Bobinski: "For me, I loved road wins. Quality road wins, for me, was one of the great differentiators between teams. When you're trying to compare teams, those that showed they can take their game away from home, away from the friendly confines of where they play, and still be really effective and compete against good teams, then if I had to break a tie, that's the first thing I looked to: How'd they do away from where they're comfortable?"
GoldandBlack.com: What else do you think should matter most?
Bobinski: "I liked to see teams that were trending well, that weren't coming unglued at the end of the year, that haven't hit a wall or lost key players. I think teams that were playing well and improving as the season went on was something I liked, particularly from a seeding perspective. I thought that was important to recognize, teams that were going in positive directions to end the year. The strong finish was important to me.
"And then the willingness to challenge yourself out of conference. Certain conferences, the Big Ten being one, you know you're going to get good games against good opponents, but then in the games that you can control, have you been willing to play good teams from other good leagues? And you don't have to win them all. That's something coaches struggle with sometimes, that, 'You're telling me to go play all these good people, but I'm going to get beat if I go play so-and-so at their place.' That's OK. It's basketball. No one's expected to go 31-0. But the fact you're willing to put your team in challenging circumstances against good people, that's something that mattered to me."
GoldandBlack.com: Who makes the call on seeding?
Bobinski: "We voted the seeding too. To be honest, the most valuable people in that room are probably the IT folks. … You do it on your laptop and it keeps refreshing, and the results come through right away."
GoldandBlack.com: What were the real close calls for you in your year as chairman?
Bobinski: "The year that I chaired, I felt pretty comfortable with the field. I did all the post-selection media stuff, whether it was CBS or ESPN or ESPN Radio, and I didn't find myself having to make many difficult justifications for a selection. We had a field that year where there wasn't tremendous controversy at the back of it, who was in, who was out. It was more about seeding that year. We had our rationale and people can agree or disagree. John (Calipari) might have had an issue, but he always has an issue where they're seeded if they're not 1. I love John, I've known John forever, but he's always, 'I can't believe they made us a 4.' Trust me, we didn't just pull it out of a hat. Go use it for motivation with your team.
"The other thing you get into is people don't understand is some of the geography, where teams are sent from their natural region to their locale. Sometimes, it's a head-scratcher and doesn't look logical, but by following the bracketing procedures and principles very, very strictly, that's something we talked about in the room, that it would be good to have the ability to go back and adjust things when something's just flat-out illogical. Move a seed line or something to allow for more logic, so you don't have teams from the West Coast flying all the way east or vice versa, things that don't make competitive sense or common sense. Can't we keep them closer to home? For fan purposes, for interest, for fatigue, for travel? I don't care how old you are, travel takes something out of you."
GoldandBlack.com: How did this make you a better athletic director?
Bobinski: "I'll tell you: The first thing it does is you create tremendously strong relationships with people. You're in this, in that foxhole with nine other colleagues and every year that 10 is different. You're in a very intense, time- and pressure-intensive situation and you get to know people really well. You spend a lot of time with them and a lot of time under pressure with them. Those relationships become very strong and they last. It provides you a stronger association around the country.
"From a pure basketball perspective, I was standing in the tunnel (in Mackey Arena before Purdue's win over Indiana) before the game and the three officials walk by and every one of them comes over, shakes my hand and gives me a hug. I chaired the officiating sub-committee for two years, so at the Final Four I ran those meetings. I know all those guys, and I know them all really well. That doesn't get us a call or anything like that, nor should it ever, but it's nice to know who those guys are, that they're quality guys.
"The other part of it is I've gotten to know all those national media guys really well. We have a respect. I've done my best to treat them well and be as accessible and forthcoming as I can be and they've treated me well. All that has been really good.
"It was all good things. I loved it. But five years is a long time and that term should definitely be it. When you get through it, you get back a huge chunk of your life. You watch so many games. Everyone takes it so seriously. When I came home at night when I was at Xavier and we'd played somewhere, I'd come home and I'd have taped X number of games. I'd start watching them. I'd watch West Coast games to make sure I knew what was going on out there. I was bleary-eyed. I was watching basketball all the time. And I wasn't around a lot. My staff at Xavier barely saw me. It was a lot of work."
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