Last March, soon after the 2006 NCAA Tournament bracket was released, selection committee chairman Craig Littlepage said a very curious thing to reporters.

Virginia’s athletic director, himself a former standout player at Penn, was asked about the committee’s perceived shift from a historical bias towards the major conferences to a new respect for the so-called mid-majors. Littlepage responded by citing the makeup of the 10-man Division 1 Men’s Basketball Committee (the proper name for the selection committee):

“He said six of the 10 committee members work at Division I-A schools, primarily from the Bowl Championship Series conferences, while only four work at schools with Division I-AA football programs,” the Indianapolis Star reported.

Littlepage’s answer was a misrepresentation of the facts. The truth is that just three members of the 2006 committee came from BCS conferences – Littlepage himself, UCLA athletic director Dave Guererro and SEC commissioner Mike Slive.

How does that translate into “primarily from BCS conferences”?

The other three committee members from Division 1-A conferences were Laing Kennedy, the athletic director at Kent State; Karl Benson, the commissioner of the WAC; and Chris Hill, the AD at Utah. Those three men do represent 1-A football conferences, but the MAC, the WAC and the Mountain West are not BCS conferences and are widely considered mid-major basketball leagues. The four remaining members of the selection committee also represented teams and leagues from the smaller conferences.

That means that seven of the 10 members of the 2006 committee came from mid-major or smaller conference. Why did Littlepage obscure that fact?

Was he merely confused by days of pressure and debate, followed by hours of grilling by the media? Or could he have been afraid that if reporters and fans looked closely at the makeup of the committee, they would see bias at work – committee members acting not as the dispassionate selectors they are supposed to be, but as self-serving bureaucrats, scheming to benefit the teams and conferences they represent?

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Charges of bias are almost as old as the tournament itself. As far back as the late 1940s, when only one team per region were picked for the four-team NCAA field, N.C. State’s Everett Case believed that his great Wolfpack teams were passed over on several occasions because Kentucky’s Adolph Rupp had friends on the selection committee.

When the tournament field opened up to more than one team per conference in the 1980s, there were more suspicious selections. In 1984, a year after Ralph Sampson left Virginia, the Cavaliers completed a mediocre 17-11 season, including a 6-8 record in ACC play. They didn’t finish particularly strong, losing by 12 points to Wake Forest in the first round of the ACC Tournament and didn’t have any eye-popping wins on their resume. Yet, somehow Virginia earned an at large bid to what was then a 48-team NCAA field.

Was it just a coincidence that Virginia athletic director Richard Schultz and former Virginia athletic director Gene Corrigan were on the selection committee?

Is it coincidence that worst RPI team ever given an at large bid (No. 74 New Mexico in 1999) just happened to be represented on the committee not only by its athletic director, Rudy Davalos, but by Craig Thompson, who had recently been hired as commissioner of the Mountain West Conference? Is it coincidence that the worst RPI team from a BCS conference to get an at large bid (No. 66 Minnesota in 1995) was represented on the committee by its athletic director, McKinley Boston? Is it coincidence that the best RPI team ever denied an at large bid (No. 21 Missouri State in 2006) was not represented on the committee?

Want something more than anecdotal evidence? Well, the ACC is one of the nation’s true power conferences. Since 1980 (when more than one team per conference could be invited), the ACC has received 106 at large bids. Over that span of 27 tournaments, the ACC has been represented on the selection committee 21 times.

In those 21 seasons, the ACC received 88 at large bids – an average of 4.2 a year.
In the six seasons when the ACC was not represented on the committee, the ACC received 18 at large bids – an average of exactly 3.0 bids a year.

That’s a pretty significant difference. But is it merely coincidence or solid evidence of bias?

The question is particularly hard to nail down because we’re not dealing with a large number of teams each season. Most of the at large picks are so self-evident that even casual fans can project 30 of the 34 picks each year. Serious bracketologists, such as Jerry Palm at collegerpi.com, routinely predict 33 or 34 of the at-large selections each season. So we’re only talking about a small handful of questionable selections.

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Even in the best of times, the committee’s job is not easy. The members are trying to compare some very different teams from very different circumstances. Most of the tough calls come down to decisions between middle-of-the-pack teams from power conferences and top teams from smaller leagues. How do you compare Florida State, 19-9 playing in the ACC, with Missouri State, 20-8 playing in the Missouri Valley, with Old Dominion, 21-9 playing in the Colonial?

The basic difficultly of the job has always provided cover for the selection committee. Littlepage used it to his advantage when asked the tough questions last spring.

Q. Why didn’t Florida State get in? A. Look at their non-conference strength of schedule. Q. But Texas A&M got in and their non-conference strength of schedule was awful. A. They have a better RPI than Florida State. Q. But Missouri State has a better RPI than either and they didn’t get in. A. But they didn’t beat enough top 50 teams. A. But they beat more than Air Force (which didn’t beat ANY!) and the Falcons got in?

You see how it goes. Is a strong finish important? It sure was to Syracuse, which rocketed from probably out of the field to a No. 5 seed with a great four-day run in the Big East Tournament. It sure wasn’t to Tennessee, which stumbled into a No. 2 seed, despite losing four of its last six games.

Littlepage, like so many former committee chairmen, has been able to duck and weave by constantly changing the subject. But not in every case.

Take a very good look at the choice between George Mason and Hofstra.

We’re not comparing apples and oranges here. We’re looking at two teams from the same conference that finished with very similar results. In fact, let’s look at the two Colonial Conference teams side by side as they stood on Selection Sunday:

Team                  Record      RPI     Last 10      vs. 1-25   vs. 26-50   vs. 51-100
George Mason     23-7         26         8-2             0-0              2-4             6-2
Hofstra                24-6         30         8-2             0-0              3-2             4-3

Pretty tough call, right? Hofstra has a one-game better record, but Mason has a very slightly better RPI. Both are exactly the same over the last 10 games. Hofstra has more wins and a better record against the top 50. Mason has one more top 100 win, although Hofstra’s top 100 winning percentage is marginally better. Mason finished one-game better in the Colonial Conference standings, tying UNC Wilmington for the regular season title, while Hoftsra went deeper into the Colonial Tournament, reaching the finals before losing to Wilmington.

If that were all there was to it, it would be hard to get too excited over the committee’s choice of George Mason over Hofstra.

But that’s not all there was to it. There are two other factors that the committee was supposed to consider:

(1) Coming down the stretch of the season, the two teams met head-to-head twice. On Feb. 23, Hofstra, playing at home, defeated George Mason, 77-66. Less than two weeks later, on a neutral court in Richmond (although a lot closer to George Mason), Hofstra defeated George Mason 58-49 in the Colonial Conference Tournament semifinals.

You’d think that in a case where two teams were so even, the fact that one team finished the season with two head-to-head victories over the other would be the tiebreaker. But there’s also:
(2) George Mason guard Tony Skinn – the team’s best or perhaps second-best player -- was suspended one game by coach Jim Larranaga for throwing a Chris Paul punch in the second loss to Hofstra. He wasn’t going to be eligible for the NCAA opener.

That’s a factor that the NCAA guidelines demand the committee consider – just as if it’s an injury. It’s very similar to the issue that kept Maryland out of the field (the Terps weren’t the same team without academic casualty Chris McCray). Skinn was out for just one game, but it’s not like this was a No. 1 seed that needed to get past a No. 16 without a top player. As a No. 11 seed, George Mason’s chances of surviving a first-round game with No. 6 Michigan State appeared to be extremely compromised by the absence of Skinn.

So why did George Mason get the bid instead of Hofstra?

It’s painfully obvious when you look at the lineup of the selection committee and see the name Tom O’Connor, athletic director at George Mason. Quite a coincidence, huh? And if that’s not enough, remember that Littlepage has a connection to George Mason’s coach, Jim Larranaga. The two served together as assistant coaches on Terry Holland’s staff at Virginia.

Maybe it does help to have a friend on the committee.

Of course, we know in hindsight that George Mason made the committee look good by upsetting Michigan State, North Carolina, Wichita State and UConn en route to reaching the Final Four. But the argument stands – the point is not that George Mason did or didn’t deserve to make the field, but that Hofstra deserved to be selected ahead of Mason. Maybe they both deserved a bid!

It so happens that Virginia, back in 1984, also parlayed its questionable selection into a Final Four run. But that’s both the beauty of the tournament and more evidence of the value of earning an extra at large bid. There is enough parity in the game that a number of borderline teams could make a deep tournament run if given the chance. For instance, South Carolina beat eventual national champion Florida twice last season and finished with a strong postseason run to win the NIT. If the Gamecocks had been given an NCAA bid, might we have seen them in the Final Four?

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There is also a financial motive for bias by the committee members.

It’s hard to define precisely the value of a single at-large bid, but the NCAA figures its payouts as units. Every one of the 65 teams selected for the field gets one unit. Every win up to the Final Four adds a unit. Last year, each unit was worth approximately $150,000. But units are also rolled over for six years, meaning that each bid is worth at least $900,000 – plus another $900,000 for each win in the tournament (not counting the Final Four).

That’s a lot of money in this era of financial pressure on athletic programs, especially at smaller schools and conferences that basically depend on men’s basketball revenues to finance their entire athletic program.

Palm, who has followed the selection process closely since 1994, posted the following on his website two days after the 2006 field was announced.

“Now that I've had a night to almost sleep on it, I think the credibility of the selection process was significantly damaged in one important way and it’s going to be hard to recover from it. The committee has said all along, and I have believed them, that having a friend on the committee is not useful. I think most people agree that the three most questionable selections in this field are George Mason, Utah State and Air Force. George Mason's AD, Utah State's commissioner and (a commissioner) from Air Force's conference were all on the committee.”

In a follow-up interview, Palm made it clear that he was not charging bias – merely suggesting that the actions of the committee would fuel the perception of bias.
“I’ve always defended the committee against that charge,” Palm said recently. “Last year made that hard to do. When you take a team for no tangible reason, people are going to look for their own reasons.”

In hindsight, Palm was less surprised by the selection of George Mason – the only reason in his eyes to reject the Patriots was the suspension of Skinn – than by the selections of Air Force and Utah State. He calls Air Force as “easily the least deserving team to get a bid” and was disturbed that Littlepage offered no rationale for selecting a team with zero top-50 wins and just five top-100 wins.

“I had nine teams with better profiles left out,” Palm said. “When they do something like that and don’t give a reason ... it’s going to create a perception. People are going to look and see Chris Hill, an athletic director from their conference, on the committee.”

Of course, defenders of the committee point out that members with ties to various schools leave the room when those teams are discussed. What they don’t mention is that those members then come back in and their fellow committee members tell them how their teams did. Then one of the other committee members would walk out of the room, and the guy who had just been rewarded or shafted gets to return the favor.

Let’s be clear. The historical record doesn’t show a consistent pattern of bias. Having an athletic director or a commissioner on the committee doesn’t always pay off – the presence of Littlepage last season hardly helped the ACC, which felt itself shafted with just four bids. What the historical record does show is that in the case of the committee’s most questionable decisions over the years, there’s almost always a connection between the lucky team and a member of the committee.

Does that mean that dishonest committee members are consciously manipulating the system? Or is it possible that the influence is subconscious?

The committee members are sequestered for days in an Indianapolis hotel, almost as if they were kidnap victims. Psychiatrists talk about the “Stockholm Syndrome” – a situation where the pressure and the enforced closeness can create an emotional bond between a kidnapper and his victims. Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that the committee members, cooped up in a hotel, cut off from most contact with the outside world and working together under tremendous pressure, could bond to the point where their relationship could subtly influence the selection process?

There’s no way to prove bias – either intentional or subconscious – but as long as the process remains hidden from public view, it’s going to be hard to quell the suspicion that the system is occasionally manipulated to benefit schools represented on the committee.