Like the actual 10-person committee will do this week, we first selected 34 at-large teams. Then, we seeded them, along with the 31 teams we deemed to have automatic bids, from 1 to 65 and constructed a bracket, trying, as best we could, to follow the actual guidelines.
The coaches agreed to join the three DN hoops writers, not really knowing what it was they were getting into. Neither, of course, did we.
We gave the automatic bids for the 31 conferences to the regular-season champion unless that team had already been eliminated or some other team had claimed the championship.
Then, we set out to find those at-large teams. We did not have the computers the committee uses to record a series of votes when selecting the teams. We skimmed over the obvious teams (Connecticut, Duke, Villanova, etc.) without discussion. Then, we started to discuss the teams on our "under consideration" list.
We did not exactly go by the rules here. We were tossing as many teams as we were adding. But we were trying to get to 34.
"It is hard to judge the mid-
majors," Dunphy said, "because they don't get the same chances."
He wondered aloud if he "could play Texas home-and-home."
Martelli was checking the score of the Robert Morris Northeast Conference semifinal game. His son, Jimmy, is an assistant coach there. His other son, Phil, is an assistant at Niagara.
"It's a tough winter when your sons have better records than you do," Martelli said.
Somehow, we arrived at our 34 in about 90 minutes. It will take the real committee several days.
Vetrone's laptop was singing as he keypunched teams in or out. The teams appeared on a screen across from our seats.
We moved on to seeding. We had five teams for our four No. 1 seeds - Pittsburgh, North Carolina, Connecticut, Oklahoma and Memphis.
