The NCAA has announced a minor change to its procedures for selecting, seeding, and bracketing its annual men's basketball tournament.
The selection committee will now include the last four men's Division I basketball teams voted into the tournament field when considering whether to slide each team up or down the seed list. Then, the last four teams on the list after "scrubbing" - a process where the committee will compare the teams against each other - will play in the First Four.
"It's a small, yet significant, alteration to the language outlining our seeding process,” said Joseph R. Castiglione, vice president and director of athletics at the University of Oklahoma and the chair of the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee for the 2015-16 season. "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."
Previously, the committee didn't include the last four teams in the scrubbing process, and therefore they didn't have an opportunity to be compared head-to-head.
The committee also has the option of sliding the top No. 2 seed out of its natural geographic area to avoid placement with the top overall team.
