A Select Group

The RPI can RIP. At least until next March.

It’s all over but the second-guessing.

Sequestered on the concierge floor of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency since Thursday, the NCAA men’s basketball selection committee has done its work--and you can bet No. 65 is not very happy with C.M. Newton’s nine-man committee of athletic directors and conference commissioners.

Address that mail, by the way, to Newton in the athletic director’s office at Kentucky, McKinley Boston Jr. at Minnesota, Rudy Davalos at New Mexico, Doug Elgin at the Missouri Valley Conference, Lee Fowler at Middle Tennessee State, Jack Kvancz at George Washington, Mike Tranghese at the Big East, Craig Thompson of the Mountain West Conference and Carroll Williams at Santa Clara.

They’re the ones who decided Stanford would have to beat its ultimate mismatch--Connecticut--to make it back to the Final Four.

They’re the ones who declared inconsistent California wouldn’t get in despite beating North Carolina, UCLA and Arizona, and Oklahoma, probably the last at-large team in, would.

Selecting and seeding the field of 64--or more accurately, the field of 34 at-large teams after the 30 automatic bids are claimed--is complicated enough without thinking about the implications: the tears of a point guard whose team is left out, the bulging financial statements of the schools that get in.

It’s one of those thankless jobs. You stay up late fretting over all the upsets--”A lot of things happened,” Newton said. “Frankly, we worked very late into the night last night.”

And you only hear the complaints.

“My first time, I was scared to death and just in awe of the process. I just thought I was so inept,” said Newton, who is in his final year on the committee after seven seasons--and admits no small part of his job as chairman is defending the group’s decisions.

“It really doesn’t get any easier, because I think the longer you’re involved in this, the more seriously you take the charge, and the charge is to select the right field once the automatic bids are determined, and to seed the field in a way that no one really has an advantage. The time we spend is pretty intense.”

Though it might seem like a process fraught with cronyism, committee members must leave the room during discussion of their own team--or teams--in the case of the commissioners--and can’t take part in votes involving their team, either.

There’s also an elaborate set of published NCAA guidelines and procedures by which the committee does its work, and the NCAA distributed a video to coaches this season outlining the criteria and seeding policies.

“I have it sitting over here on my desk,” Stanford Coach Mike Montgomery said last week. “I think they’re just trying to provide information for everybody that wants to criticize them--so that you understand how difficult the process is, and when something comes up, instead of having to deal with a lot of questions, maybe that question is answered ahead of time.”

A few disappointed coaches might be digging out that video for a review today.

Most of the teams are obvious--the automatics bids and the all-but-automatic teams in the top 25.

But when it gets down to the nitty gritty of picking the final teams to make the bracket, it gets down to the Nitty Gritty.

That is an actual NCAA term for the format used to compare two teams being considered against each other for a spot.

It includes:

* Division I record.

* Overall RPI.

* Nonconference record.

* Nonconference RPI.

* Conference record.

* Conference RPI.

* Road record.

* Record in the last 10 games.

* Record vs. Nos. 1-25 in the RPI.

* Record vs. Nos. 26-50 in the RPI.

* Record vs. Nos. 51-100 in the RPI.

* Record vs. Nos. 101-150 in the RPI.

* Record vs. teams below No. 150 in the RPI.

* Record vs. teams that already have qualified or been selected for the field.

* Record vs. other teams being considered for at-large bids.

* Injuries that have affected the team’s performance.

All of which brings us to a question: What exactly is the RPI again?

Officially, the NCAA won’t reveal the formula for its Ratings Percentage Index, a computer-generated ranking intended to gauge record and strength-of-schedule. Several groups attempt to duplicate the RPI, including the Collegiate Basketball News, which posts its rankings on the Internet at https://www.a1.com/rpiratings.

Nobody appears to have the formula exactly, but Newton says the approximations are close enough.

The RPI doesn’t rule, though. New Mexico, at No. 74, proved that. So did Utah’s No. 2 seeding.

“We don’t just let the computer decide,” Newton said.

“The RPI is one tool and only one tool, just as the coaches advisory committee is one tool. You look at the coaches, they have consistently had New Mexico in the top 25 because they win games, not because of what some computer spews out.”

Much more of a mystery than which teams will make it is where they will go, who they will play and the seeding of the 64 teams, which began in 1979.

“Sunday is pretty intense, because we’ve pretty well got the field and we go to zeroing in on seeding and bracketing,” Newton said.

“We do hit the wall at times. “We’ll hit a point where we’re going over the same ground and it starts getting fuzzy. When you hit the wall, the chairman calls timeout--you can take a 20-second timeout that becomes 20 minutes.”

Balancing the four regions is the first priority of the bracketing--the committee uses an ‘S’ curve that makes sense only on paper.

It’s also imperative to avoid pitting conference teams against each other before a regional final.

But maybe the most volatile issue is geography--witness the ire of a team sent cross-country when there is a regional an hour-and-a-half away.

“We would like to place everybody geographically,” Newton said.

It can’t be done, so the teams that are protected tend to be the highest seeds--it takes a committee vote to move a No. 1 or No. 2--and the lowest-seeded teams. The committee doesn’t see much point in sending a first-round loser three time zones away if it can help it.

“We feel we have an obligation to protect the top seeds and not have a situation where you send a top seed into a hostile situation against a lower seed. We want as best we can to accommodate higher-seeded teams.”

That’s often impossible, especially when Duke and Connecticut, both top-seeded teams, wanted to play in the East--Duke so it could start in Charlotte, N.C., and Connecticut so it could start in Boston.

Then one of the factors becomes how recently a team has been sent out of its region--so in theory, anyway, that’s why UCLA shouldn’t have to head East every year.

The committee’s work isn’t done in complete isolation--the members go out for a jog or a walk or even for dinner.

“If people recognize you, they might speak to you or holler, good-naturedly,” Newton said. “The Big 12 tournament is going on in Kansas City, and we get probably two or three teams housed at our hotel. We don’t see them, and the fans, most of the time they don’t recognize you.”

But on Sunday afternoon, Newton emerges to face the music. And it isn’t “One Magic Moment.” Not yet.