While we're in the down time before the tourney resumes, I thought Jay's piece on ESPN Insider with suggestions for improving the NCAA selection process was very interesting.

Aside from some things he and others have suggested before (e.g., more “basketball people” doing the selection/seeding process and replacing RPI as an “organizational tool” with Sagarin/Ken Pom data), he also suggests making a much bigger structural change to how the season now ends, namely to move "Selection Sunday" up by one week, so that it immediately follows the end of the regular season.

Jay explains his proposal, in part, as: ". . . the committee [would] select the 68 best teams based upon the regular season's body of work, without concern for automatic qualifiers. [This would] make conference tournaments about the automatic bids and conference pride only, rather than earning late brownie points.”

The mechanics would be: “select the best teams and rank them on the S-Curve, and then the automatic qualifiers [who win bids in conference tournaments] would knock out the lowest-ranked teams on the curve, one by one.”

I assume, under Jay's proposal, the seeding/bracketing would then still be done and announced at the same time it is now.

This proposal takes some of the drama out of the selection announcement and, obviously, substantially reduces the bubble speculation.

But, it has the great advantage of letting clubs like Va Tech and Colorado and Bama know in advance exactly what they have to do in their conference tournaments in order to get in (or else hope for very few conferences to be won by bid-stealers).

I think this is a very good proposal - of course, it will never happen as it would entail far too much transparency (and allow for lots of political pressure, lobbying and griping about who should be where on the S-curve).