There are few better authorities to discuss the work that goes into selecting the 68-team NCAA Men's Basketball Championship field than George Mason director of athletics Tom O'Connor. A five-year member of the NCAA selection committee, O'Connor was the chair during the 2007-08 season. He was recently profiled in the NCAA News , and the GoMason Blog had the chance to sit down with O'Connor to talk more about what goes on in the room.

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Q: How does the process get started and when do the first real deliberations take place?

A: The first real discussions probably start in January at the NCAA Convention.  In my year as Chair, I suggested that the committee get together during the convention and discuss how teams are doing out of conference, to just give a general overview before they get into conference play.  So we had a pretty good feel on how people were doing at that point.  Then we met in February, to go over a lot of logistical issues, but we talk about teams, and do a mock draft during that time.  That's more for procedural rather than actual picking teams, but as we do that we're following along the progress of the team.  Then on selection week, when I was the Chair, I went into New York on Sunday night and met with some of the principals at CBS, and then on Monday had a press conference with the media concerning CBS's role and TV - all of the announcers that were doing the games, as well as the directors and production crew.  From there, I flew to Indianapolis where we had an executive meeting with the NCAA staff and then on the next day, on Tuesday, we really started to grind down some of the issues surrounding the tournament:  officials, sites, and anything that we had to do other than the selection process.  Tuesday night, we began the actual selection and that went all the way through Sunday and we put a qualifier in that everything had to be in and done by 12 midnight on Saturday. We allowed Sunday for a period of time to say, "Let's look one more time, do we need to scrub this one more time."  And any results that happened the night before, do they have a bearing on seeding or bracketing.  I believe in that particular year when I was chair, we were done by 4 o'clock.  That gives an opportunity to do all the logistical things that had to be done and then we send it to CBS.  There was one year - I forget exactly what year it was - that we actually didn't finish until about 5:20 and getting that to CBS was a little bit strained because they had to have everything done by the 6 o'clock show.  So going back from early in January to the actual selections, you do a lot of work, you do a lot of preparation, and you monitor the teams you're supposed to on a daily basis.

Q: How does the process of including/excluding teams work?

A: What we had was an initial ballot and the initial ballot I believe had to be in Wednesday morning or Tuesday night, but it did have a deadline that you had to have it in and so you would pick from all of the teams in the country, you would have every team in the country and you'd have two columns.  One was that the team was in and the second column was consideration.  And I believe if the team got eight out of the ten votes, then they were considered in the tournament and the rest of the teams were on a considered board.  So for sake of example right now, you may have on the first go-round 24 teams that were in the tournament.  Now within that 24, there may have been, there were teams that were going to be their conference champion and got an automatic qualifier so you would take them out, but you wouldn't know that at that time because you're doing an initial ballot ... The first ballot was pretty easy because you have the 24 teams.  The second ballot was fairly easy and then after that it became more difficult and down to the last couple of teams.

Q: How many ballots would you eventually go through?

A: One year, I think there were actually 67 ballots we went through.  Now they may have been tiebreakers, they may have been put in order as they came in and moving things around so you have to be aware of how you voted and make your own notes about where you voted on a particular team at some point.  If you didn't watch that, you could really get confused.  That's why we had that meeting in February, so we would go through all the processes not only from a computer standpoint, but from the processes of each individual taking their own notes, and making sure they didn't miss their place on the ballot.

Q:  Is there a certain point where you can no longer change your vote, if at all?

A: Well we have a discussion period.  The whole purpose is picking the best teams, the best at-large teams and so you're not arguing for a particular team, what you're doing is you're trying to show people that this is the résumé that a team would have.  Once all that discussion came forward, then you would make that quality decision on who you thought was best.  If you made the best argument that this team should be in the tournament for various reasons, but you weren't an advocate for that team and you had to watch that because it became too, I don't want to say personal, but you get too involved with a team and you get away from just picking the best and that was a really important factor in that.

Q: How much does a team's past history in the tournament impact their seeding and qualifications?

A:  Past tournament history doesn't play a factor at all, even if it was just the year before.  It's a different team, a different year, it could be a different coach, it could be different scenarios from what's happened since the first game.  You look at what happens from the first game of the year to the last game of the year, you analyze that.  That would be very unfair.  In fact, a number of us would take a look at teams and put a piece of paper over the names of the teams, so it wouldn't have any bearing on a quantitative analysis.  And then we would just take a look at the qualitative, how well a team played in that particular year and so experience, marquee value, brand identification doesn't have any play in that at all.

Q:  What is the biggest misconception about the process?

A: You never talk about conference.  What happens is that it's interesting, you do the monitoring reports on the conference that you monitor and that happens on your first go-round when you first get there, you bring everyone up to date.  That's the last time it ever comes up because you get your ballot in alphabetical order and it's really interesting that you don't even think of conference, you think of that individual team.  So people think out there that the committee puts teams in because of conferences.  The media right now lists how many teams from a particular conference get in.  You never even know that until after everything is done.  It was interesting in my second year, my first year just seems like a blur in a way, but in the second year I didn't know who played who until I actually saw the bracket that comes out to the general public because the way we do the seed and then the bracketing, we have a different screen that does it a different way than the actual bracket comes out and so that just solidified my thinking at that point is you don't talk about conference at all.  So the general public will think you know how many teams are going to get in from the Big East, or the Horizon League, or the CAA, doesn't make any difference to the committee members, just the best at-large teams in the country regardless of conference.

Q:  As the Athletic Director, do you get any early notice if Mason gets in?

A:  None.  That's when we find out, the selection show.  In fact, the year that Mason went (in 2006), we were selected as an at-large, and we were selected relatively early in the process.  In fact, we were selected on Friday and no one knew.  My family didn't know, my wife didn't know.  There's a tremendous amount of trust and integrity that goes on in that room.  You're sequestered for a reason.  It's done that way for a purpose.  I in particular, did not tell family or my wife because I wanted her to share in the excitement when it happened, it would have been anti-climatic if she knew.  I didn't have any phone calls or anything like that so when it happened, she was and the rest of the family just as happy and excited as everyone else in the room.

Q:  What's your favorite non-Mason tournament memory?

A:  Well I'm really prejudiced to that because when I was chair, we had all of the number-one seeds go to the Final Four, I think that's the only time it's ever happened.  And so my favorite game was the championship game, when Kansas hit the shot against Memphis to put it into overtime, that was just a phenomenal, goosebump type of game.  An overtime game in a national championship game, someone hitting the shot to put it into overtime, then the overtime that happened there ... I would say that whole San Antonio Final Four was my favorite.  Again, I'm prejudiced to that and San Antonio was just a phenomenal place to have a tournament; the stars were aligned at that particular site.

Q:  What's the most exciting and satisfying part of an at-large bid?

A:  I think the most satisfying for me is when your name is read and you see the faces of the players because they're the ones that you do this for.  It's a championship for student-athletes, and they've worked hard.  It's a dream to play in the NCAA tournament and to watch their faces when the name is announced; it's all smiles.  If you can make people happy, especially people who have worked so hard and done something special and doing it out of love for the game, I think that's the special part.  Even on the selection show, in other years, knowing that George Mason was not going to be in, I always zoomed in on the faces of the athletes that were selected.  That's the best part because as I said, again it's championship for student-athletes.  They made it, they should be happy and to make people happy that's great.

Q: As a member of the committee, what was the most rewarding and exciting part of the process?

A:  I think there are two things.  One is being on the committee, especially when I was the Chair; it was most gratifying professionally to get a group of nine people thinking the same way, and to make sure that we got it right, to make sure everyone was comfortable with the bracket. It was something that needed to be done, that everyone had to be together on the same page because of the fact we were picking teams as at-large and had a big bearing on their happiness as players, as coaches, as fans, and the universities as a whole.  Going through the tournament, there were stages where it was a very special time.  When you got to the venue, especially in the first round, one of my favorite days is the first day at a venue because all of the teams in that particular site are coming out.  Again, they have smiles on their faces.  You can see them waiting to get their hands on that basketball so they can start shooting in the NCAA tournament.  Every site you go to all the way up to the Final Four, you get that enormous feeling of gratification that positive things are happening.  It's in the room and doing the right thing, having the venues set up the right way, and making sure that everyone has the best experience they could possibly have during this championship.