Every year the NCAA Tournament kicks off with the First Four, in which eight teams enter playoff games to continue on in the Big Dance.
After some controversy over how those teams are selected, the NCAA Division I men's basketball selection committee altered its rules somewhat at their annual meeting in San Diego, ESPN reported.
The committee changed its "procedures and principles" to allow them to change the last four at-large teams' seeding. Those four teams in last season's tournament were Dayton, Boise State, BYU, and Ole Miss, all of which vied for the 11-seed in their respective regions. As 16-seeds, Hampton, Manhattan, North Florida, and Robert Morris played in the other First Four matchups.
Meanwhile, the selection committee voted in UCLA and Texas as at-large 11-seeds before voting in the last four. If the alterations to the selection rules were in play last March, the committee would have been able to slide UCLA and/or Texas into the final four at-large slots.
The change may not make significant waves throughout men's college basketball, but UCLA and Texas' seeding drew the ire of some fans and pundits.
"It's a small, yet significant, alteration to the language outlining our seeding process," Committee Chair Joseph R. Castiglione, the athletic director at the University of Oklahoma, said in a statement. "Making this change gives the committee the opportunity to properly seed every team, whereas previous procedures did not permit appropriate scrubbing of the last four at-large teams.
"Selecting teams usually involves looking at teams in groups of eight. Scrubbing is comparing two teams against one another and sometimes there's greater clarity during that process due to head-to-head competition, record versus common opponents or wins against tournament teams. This tweak provides us with the opportunity to scrub teams even more thoroughly."
