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SELECTION SUNDAY
Selection Sunday is
the day when the
NCAA
College
Basketball tournament participants are announced, placed and seeded
accordingly. 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 and Women's basketball tournaments that take place in
March and
April.
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 XII,
Pac 10, and
SEC. The selection committee takes great care, however, to treat
teams from "mid-major" and "minor" conferences fairly.
Selection Sunday is a day
of anxiety and excitement for College Basketball fans and players
throughout the country.
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