Selection Sunday
Selection Sunday and
Selection Monday are the days when the
NCAA College basketball tournament participants are announced, placed and seeded accordingly. It is known as the
selection process. The NCAA committee gathers to select and place 65 men's teams and 64 women's teams that they deem worthy of an invitation to the
NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship and the
NCAA Women's Division I Basketball Championship basketball tournaments that take place in March and April. The men's teams are announced on Sunday on
CBS, and the women's teams are announced the following Monday on
ESPN.
The day is always filled with much speculation and information on the
bubble teams that may or may not make it.
The field consists of the following:
Automatic bids — These bids, 31 in all, go to conference champions. Of these bids, 30 go to conference tournament champions. The
Ivy League is the only conference that does not conduct a postseason tournament; in that conference, the regular-season champion receives the automatic bid. Most conferences have their tournaments on the week preceding Selection Sunday. The NCAA reserves the right, at the beginning of the season, to revoke the automatic bid of minor conferences. The number of conferences now is sufficiently small, though, that the NCAA is not expected to exercise this right in the near future.
At-large bids — These are schools that the NCAA selection committees (separate committees for men and women) deem worthy of a tournament bid. The men's tournament has 34 at-large bids available; the women's tournament invites 33 at-large teams. A few basketball-intensive athetic conferences traditionally earn at least 4 bids each in the Men's and Women's tournaments: the six "major" conferences of the
Big East,
ACC,
Big 10,
Big 12,
Pac 10, and
SEC. The selection committee takes great care, however, to treat teams from "mid-major" and "low-major" conferences fairly.
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Bracketology
