New challenges await NCAA committee

The bracket sheet for the NCAA men's basketball tournament won't look any different. The selection committee, however, has a chance to make the opening-round matchups quite different.

When the 10-member committee meets next month in Indianapolis to complete and seed the 65-team field, it will have new options in where teams play the first weekend.

A rule change voted in this summer allows the committee to keep teams, regardless of seeding, closer to home the first two rounds.

First-year chairman Lee Fowler, the athletic director at North Carolina State, and the other members of the committee met in Indianapolis on Feb. 5-6 to run mock-ups of the tournament.

He said Wednesday that while the new format would be time-consuming for the committee, it would achieve the NCAA's goal of making more games accessible to players' families.

"We did this to keep more people close to home," Fowler said during a conference call. "While we will try to keep the 1-5 seeds closer to home, it could also keep a lot of the 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16 seeds closer to home, too. That's really what we wanted to do."

In an effort to reduce travel, the NCAA will place schools in four-team brackets and can put each of those brackets in sites without regard to the regional groupings.

Pittsburgh, for instance, could play host to four teams in the East Regional and four teams in the Midwest Regional. Those winners will advance to the natural regional sites the following weekend.

The rule change came about after Maryland, Georgetown and George Mason -- schools separated by about 30 miles -- were placed in the same West regional bracket in Boise, Idaho, last year.

"That may have been the straw that made us look at it," Fowler said. "But we had talked about it for two, three summers in a row. We meet with committee alumni every summer, and there are guys who had brought that up. Last year brought it to a head a little bit."

The changes won't affect the traditional bracket sheet.

"It will look the same and we think it will take people only one time through it to get used to the changes," NCAA spokesman Jim Marchiony said. "We have been trying to fax and e-mail all kinds of information to the media so they can digest it. People will be surprised that it will look exactly the same, except a site will be listed for every four teams instead of every eight teams as it had in the past."

The tournament field will be announced March 10, and play starts two days later with the opening-round game between the 64th and 65th teams in Dayton, Ohio. The winner of that game advances to the first round, which starts March 14-15.