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NATIONAL COLLEGIATE ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION MEDIA CONFERENCE

March 11, 2008

Judy Southard

JUDY SOUTHARD: Good morning, everyone. It's my pleasure to be with you today. I look forward to our question-and-answer session over the next hour, and I'm going to do the best I can to answer as many of your questions as possible.
This is a great time of year for all of us and an exciting time for women's basketball. The 2007-08 season has been one filled with many great accomplishments by our student athletes and teams, and I'm sure I speak for all of our committee members, the coaches, student athletes and the many fans who follow our game when I say that I personally can't wait for the 2008 championship to begin.
I want to give you just a little insight into what's going to transpire over the next few days. The selection seeding and bracketing process is one of the committee's highest priorities, and Thursday we will gather in Indianapolis to begin that work.
As is always the case, we expect to be challenged by the process of selecting the best available 33 teams at large and then seeding and bracketing the 64-team field.
Over the past several years, our committee has made several changes to the process that we feel have enhanced the manner in which we seed and bracket the event, and I can tell you that the current committee is very comfortable with the evolution of this process. We feel that it ensures that every team is treated equally, and the built-in integrity aspect means it all comes down ultimately to how well teams have done on the court over the entire body of their work for the season.
As far as our committee preparation is concerned, let me say that our group has spent hundreds of hours watching games. Just this morning we were informed on a conference call with our committee members that collectively we have watched over 1,600 games at the end of the February reporting period, and I would dare say that if you add what we have seen and will see through the first two weeks in March, it's safe to say that we may have watched close to 2,000 games by the time we arrive in Indianapolis on Thursday evening.
In addition to the number of games that we view, we have access to an abundance of information, including conference monitoring reports and input from the Coaches Regional Advisory Committee rankings. We also have in-depth access to NCAA-provided resources that allow us to drill down into the core of every team's complete body of work in order to be able to analyze a team's worthiness for selection.
Our process, of course, is an arduous process. It's one that takes an enormous amount of time. But I know that all of our committee members feel that it's both challenging and rewarding, and of course we do, in fact, look forward to this every year.
I'm going to do the best I can to answer as many questions as possible, but since there is still some very important basketball to be played this week and on through the weekend, I am going to be cautious about trying to answer specific questions about certain teams.
Having said all of that, I will now throw it back to Rick, and we can begin the question-and-answer portion of this teleconference.

Q. I was just wondering, what factors take precedence when you're deciding where to send the No. 1 teams -- No. 1 seed? Is it match-ups that they might have against the No. 2, or is it avoiding conference teams in an early match-up, or is it strictly location?
JUDY SOUTHARD: We have a set of principles and procedures that dictate how the teams are placed in the bracket, and that is public information and it can be accessed by going to the NCAA site and to the basketball -- women's basketball layer of that site, and you can access those principles and procedures.
But in a nutshell, the way this works is that we place teams in the bracket in the order that they are on the S-curve, and certainly as it relates to the No.1 seed specifically as you started your question, we would take the overall No. 1 seed and we would first place them in the bracket and they would be placed at the site that is the geographic -- that is located geographically closest to their campus, and then we repeat that process with each team on line one. So you would send the first team to the closest site, and then you would send the second team to the closest remaining of the three sites remaining and et cetera through the lines.

Q. Then with regards to No. 2 seeds, you can't do the same thing with them, right? Or do you, and do you just disregard giving the highest-ranked No. 1 team the lowest ranked No. 2 team for match-up purposes?
JUDY SOUTHARD: I think the most important thing for everybody to understand is that the function of the S-curve is to place teams in the bracket. There's no implied strength of power in the location of a team on the S-curve. The S-curve is used -- the function of the S-curve is to specifically place the teams in the bracket.
Part of what we try to accomplish by doing that is to make sure that we are providing an atmosphere for our student athletes that hopefully will be electric with fan support, and by attempting to try to get teams play in locations close to their campus, hopefully their fans can follow them.
Now, let me say this: Once we have completed the seeding process and once we start the bracketing process, we do have principles that will allow us to slide a team along a seed line or to slide a team up and down a seed line. And we will frequently invoke those principles in order to make sure that we are doing the best job possible to balance the bracket.
I think you can see ultimately we get to the place where I think your question wants us to get to. We're going to do the best we can to have a fair and equitable bracket. Balance does not always mean equal, but we're going to do the best we can to balance the bracket as best as possible, allowing ourselves the use of other principles and procedures that will let us do that.

Q. Just to simplify it, can you just tell me, do you try, if everything else is equal, to give the strongest No. 1 seed, what you guys have figured out, who you believe is the best No. 1 seed, to match up against the worst of the No. 2 seeds?
JUDY SOUTHARD: I don't think really that that's a fair question for me to try to answer because, as I said, we have to place the teams on the seed lines first, and then we apply the principles and procedures that tell us how to place them in the bracket.
Once we get there, if we see an imbalance, and we do have a way that we can add points through the process, if we see any imbalance beginning to occur in any geographic region, that is the point that we will stop, use other principles that will allow us to move teams around.

Q. I wanted to follow up a little bit for a little bit more clarity on the previous question. If a team from a conference is an automatic bid and they are the only one representing their conference, and for argument's sake they would be seeded first, and then once they're seeded, they would be sent to the closest geographical location; is that fair to say?
JUDY SOUTHARD: I'm not exactly sure I understand your question, so let me just take you through a process. Once we have the 64 teams selected, then we go through a voting process that begins to put those teams into the bracket in groups of fours or along seed lines. Once we've got the entire S-curve in place, we go back to the No. 1 team that was selected and we begin to process, in order, 1 through 64, placing the teams in the bracket.
The teams are placed in the bracket in numerical order according to the closest geographic location. The exception to that would be if we have a situation where a team is placed in the bracket in a manner such that it has to play another team from its same conference prior to getting to the regional championship. We do have a principle that will not allow us to place a team in the bracket in a manner that they can see someone from its own conference prior to getting to the regional championship.

Q. I guess we might go at this for hours so I want to be really brief. If it's an automatic bid and there's no other team from that conference, and this team arguably becomes an 8 seed we'll say. Amongst the 8 seeds, the four 8 seeds that are there, they'll each be sent as best as possible to the closest location?
JUDY SOUTHARD: Yeah, and we actually begin that process by going with the first No. 8 seed that's on that line. When you get to the 8, you're talking about -- I'm trying to do the math here. What would that be? Nos. 32, 33, 34 and 35. If they're No. 32, that's the order that we would go in. We would first move them into a region closest geographical -- we do it by region first. We put them in a region first that is located closest to their campus. Then we do the same thing with the three remaining and so forth.
Now, once we've done that -- and I go back to the gentleman's question that I answered first, once we've done that, we always have the option to go back and move teams along a seed line or up and down a seed line if we need to do so to balance a bracket.

Q. I'm wondering if there's any emphasis among the selection committee to keep middle-of-the-pack seeds, 7 through 10, close to home, especially when they have a site in their home state but they might not be the home -- the host site?
JUDY SOUTHARD: Probably the most important thing we did recently was tweak our principles to allow us to not have to separate the first three teams from any one league, and consequently what that's done is make sure two teams from the same league don't play each other prior to the regional championship. Then we're going to be okay with placing them -- we start at the regional level, but then what we try to do is we do try to do the best we can to place teams at first and second rounds, again, geographically, to get them as close to their campus as possible.

Q. Just wondered, regarding No. 1 seeds, did it help you at all that teams such as Rutgers and Maryland got eliminated maybe before they were expected to in their league tournaments, and just make the group of teams vying for those No. 1 spots slightly smaller?
JUDY SOUTHARD: I don't think there's any question -- as all of us who have followed this season very closely, I don't think there's been a lot of question regarding the fact that over the course of the year we've seen a great deal of balance between those seven or eight teams that arguably would be on the 1 and 2 line.
I think what begins to happen is as you move closer to the end of the season, these things all begin to kind of sort themselves out, and certainly some things that begin to transpire make the separation between how you determine the 1 seeds and the 2 seeds a lot clearer.
As a committee person, we are looking for anything we can find on a team's résumé that is going to set it apart from another team, and certainly a team that gets to the semifinals of their tournament, a team that gets to the championship or wins the championship of their tournament, those are items that become résumé builders.
And on the flipside, obviously sometimes that's the way teams begin to sort themselves out of the process is by not doing those kinds of things. So I wouldn't want to get into speculating of what my committee -- my fellow committee members, how they may be analyzing that, but certainly we think that anything that happens at this point in time of the year, it can be a résumé builder or it can be one of those things that sets a team aside from someone else.

Q. I kind of want to touch a little bit on specifically the Big Ten conference and kind of what you've seen this year, where you see they are right now headed into the selection committee after the conference tournament and in general the at-large procedure.
JUDY SOUTHARD: Well, first of all, let me just say that we don't specifically look at conferences. Once we go into the process, conference affiliation has absolutely nothing to do with the process that we go through as individuals and as we analyze the bracket and the teams that we are trying to move into the bracket.
We are gauging each team based on its own individual merit. Now, certainly we do know that conference affiliation has a lot to do with the way a team's schedule is put together, but for the most part we are not looking at conference affiliation, nor do we have a predisposed idea as to how many teams within a conference should or shouldn't be in the tournament. Certainly this is great information or great fodder for the media, but it's just one of those things that we don't look at.
So we will be taking all of the members of the Big Ten as individual teams and we will be looking at them in comparison to all the other individual teams in the country who are vying for one of those 33 at-large spots.

Q. Would I understand it then that if say the Big East had eight teams, and they could only have two in each region, is that true?
JUDY SOUTHARD: Not necessarily. What the principles and procedures forbid is any two teams from the same league meeting in the regional finals. Now, they also are not allowed to be placed in the same grouping of four where they would see each other in a manner before they got to the regional finals. So I think it would be mathematically possible for two teams -- more than two teams -- certainly if there were at least eight, we would do everything to separate all eight of them or two in each region. If there were a ninth team then mathematically somebody else has got to go in.

Q. Since the first two rounds are in Des Moines, one question we have is do you look at geography as you place the teams, or is it strictly a 1 to 64 seed?
JUDY SOUTHARD: I would assume that you were not on the call for the first question because we did cover that during the first question. That's okay. It's a series of principles and procedures that we use for the bracketing. Those principles and procedures are available at the NCAA website. That is public information.
But just to recap it very briefly since we've already answered that, teams are placed in the bracket in geographic order according to the -- teams are placed in the bracket in mathematical or in numerical order to be placed as close to their campus as possible. For instance, the first team would be placed closest to their campus; the number two team would be placed in the next closest of the three remaining sites, and et cetera, and we do that same process through each seed line.

Q. So obviously if you're a 7 seed then, it's better than if you're a 10 seed as far as getting placed close to home?
JUDY SOUTHARD: You know, I can't really say that that's necessarily true. We're still going to do the best we can to try to get everybody as close to their campus as possible, and a lot of it depends on the makeup of the bracket and how many teams from each geographical location are landing along each seed line, so I wouldn't say that would be totally accurate.

Q. A couple questions ago you talked about résumé builders. A mid-major school played a very tough non-conference and only lost twice, two teams with RPIs both in the top 40. Could you say where you would think they would be placed, considering their run last year and things along that line?
JUDY SOUTHARD: Well, the first thing I would say to you is the past is the past, and we don't even go back and look at previous history at all as we move into the selection process for the current year. So although certainly we would applaud Marist for a great year last year, and I had the opportunity to see them play in the regionals, I had an opportunity to be in Dayton with them, we certainly would applaud their performance last year. But it will have absolutely no bearing on what happens this year.
The second thing I would say is that it would be unfair for me to try to speculate. We have ten committee members who are going to evaluate Marist in similar ways and some in different ways, and there's no way for me to project knowing how our committee members will treat Marist and consequently I think very unfair to try to say anything about where we would think they would be seeded at this point. There's still too much basketball to be played.

Q. Would you say the non-conference schedule is bigger than the postseason tournament for a mid-major team such as Marist? You mentioned being in a bigger conference, the power conferences, this is the most important part of the year for them, but for a mid-major, would the non-conference schedule mean the most as their conferences aren't as strong?
JUDY SOUTHARD: I wouldn't prioritize what's most important, one or the other. I would simply say that we certainly would encourage conferences who are historically referred to as the middle major conferences that may not be in some of the power leagues, we certainly encourage them to look at how they schedule out of conference and recognize the fact that they can either be a benefactor of or a victim of their conference. And consequently what they can do out of conference can, in fact, enhance their résumé.
But we never lose sight of the fact that a conference has to take care of the business at hand that they have the ability to take care of, and that is what they do within their conference, also.

Q. Wondering if you can tell me sort of how losses and/or wins, I guess, against ranked teams really plays into how the seeding goes. Arizona State in particular has lost almost all of its games against ranked teams. It has a really good record but hasn't beaten ranked teams. Kind of wondering how that might play into the seeding process.
JUDY SOUTHARD: Speaking at a universal level here, let's go back to the fact that we have ten committee members who all analyze everything that we have in front of us in different ways, and different things become more important to one committee member than they may to another. And to some degree that's the beauty of our process is that we have a cross-representation on our committee of people who have different and varied experiences in basketball, and they come from various geographic regions of the country.
I as a former coach may put more emphasis on evaluating what I see on TV because I am analyzing the way a team responds in the competition arena and in certain games against certain competition. Someone else on our committee may spend more time analyzing the quantitative analysis or the quantitative values that we have or the numbers that we have available to us with all the resources and the tools that we have to use.
I'm not sure that I could really tell you how that will all translate into a final seeding for any certain team because it basically is ten people sitting in a room with ten separate votes, and it's a secret ballot, that go in and pretty much gives us the seed order that we use for the rest of the process.
Now, we also have lengthy dialogue that goes on as we move through that process, and so quite frankly, some of those issues that you're raising and that some of our other people who have asked questions have raised will have to do with how people evaluate that information.

Q. This is the last year that you're going to have eight teams at one site; you're going to 16 sites next year. Just take us through the process of how the committee came to that decision to go back to the 16 first- and second-round sites next year.
JUDY SOUTHARD: Well, the committee really did its homework on this, and we have some tough decisions to make as it relates to the overall betterment of the game and the championship. This particular decision was based on the championship's current state and the committee's commitment of the growth of the championship. With an understanding that we have to continue to enhance the student athlete championship experience, we want to enhance our attendance at preliminary rounds, and of course we're equally concerned with continuing to enhance our television ratings.
We spent a great deal of time discussing this, and we spent a great deal of time talking with members of the WBCA board of directors. What they have told us is they want a fair and equitable championship, increased attendance during the early rounds to enhance the student athlete experience and stronger television ratings to grow the game. So with all of that feedback, we felt like that the best way to accomplish all of that was to go to a 16-site format, which obviously mathematically, as well as regionally, you can tell by going to 16 sites, we're going to have more sites within closer proximity of more of our member institutions, campuses, and we're of the opinion that that certainly is going to help our attendance, it's going to help the atmosphere within the arena, which will enhance the student athlete experience, and consequently we feel like that type of atmosphere will also attract more TV viewers and hopefully translate to higher TV ratings.

Q. My question is this: With your ten-person committee, I know there's a situation where one of the members is going to a new institution sometime this spring --
JUDY SOUTHARD: I'm sorry, what now?

Q. One of the members of your committee --
JUDY SOUTHARD: -- will be leaving our committee to go to another institution -- well, will be leaving their institution to go to another institution. Go ahead with your question.

Q. Is that going to change the committee for the future? I know it won't change it for this week, but --
JUDY SOUTHARD: No, the committee will remain as it is. The individual who will be leaving their current institution will not be leaving their institution until after the Final Four, which allows him to continue to serve on the committee.
At the point that that individual leaves, they will be leaving the conference that they are currently affiliated with, and the committee appointment belongs to the conference. So we will rely at that point on the conference commissioner making a recommendation to the committee, which will have to be approved by the championships cabinet for an individual to replace that person. Whoever that person is, they will take over those duties and responsibilities I would assume effective with our meeting in June.

Q. Out of curiosity, can you sort of tell us how much fun -- I don't know if that's the right word to use, but what kind of experience this weekend will be? I know a lot of people like to tell stories about the crazy weekend that they have and maybe gain 20 pounds or whatever they do during this weekend.
JUDY SOUTHARD: Well, it's -- as I said in my opening statement, it's a very arduous task, but we certainly do try to enjoy the process as much as we possibly can.
I can tell you that the NCAA staff leaves nothing much to be desired to make the processes easy and as simple as they can in any way possible, including the way they support us throughout the difficult processes of analyzing the teams and helping us to analyze resources and giving us any resource we ask for.
And then they also do other things that enhance the process for us and make it a lot of fun as it relates to making sure that we have probably the best menu available for any in-house eating or dining that you could possibly want.
We are pretty much sequestered during the process. I've had people ask me if we even go outside or if we're under lock and key, and of course that's not the case. We try to take our breaks as we can for a little bit of mental health and some physical activity. We have several committee members who enjoy working out and would like to get outside and go for a walk and things such as that.
We have a very, very close group of people. When you operate under the pressures that we operate under and you are held to such scrutiny, and to some degree sometimes criticism, maybe more so than even the accolades that we receive, you do become very, very close, and it becomes a very closely-knit group of people. We all have a great deal of respect for one another professionally, but in addition to that we've all become very close friends throughout this process.
It's a long day, it's a long evening. When we get down toward the end of the process we're running on probably only four or five hours of sleep a night if we're lucky, and some of our staff members are only operating on three or four hours of sleep a night.
All in all, though, I would say that I personally have found the entire association with this group and my service on this committee to be one of the most professionally enriching, as well as one of the funnest and most enjoyable parts of my career.

End of FastScripts

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