Selection Sunday is one of the most noteworthy days in college athletics each year. Last March, Bradley was a part of the festivities with the men’s basketball team earning a No. 15 seed.
However, it’s less known that Bradley’s vice president for intercollegiate athletics, Dr. Chris Reynolds, put in a lot of work behind the scenes to make Selection Sunday happen.
Reynolds serves on the 10-member NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee. He and the other nine members select the 36 at-large bid teams, seed all 68 teams and bracket the tournament.
Last season was Reynolds’ first on the committee after he was nominated by Missouri Valley Conference commissioner Doug Elgin, a former member of the committee from 1998-2002.
“Doug Elgin put my name forward and I just got a call,” Reynolds said. “Through the NCAA membership, they have various committee vacancies. The committee members come from different parts of the country, so there has to be a vacancy in your region.”
Reynolds played in four NCAA tournaments including the 1992 Final Four during his time on Bobby Knight’s Indiana Hoosiers squad.
“It gives me a different perspective having actually played in a Final Four so you’ve seen the other side of it as a student-athlete,” Reynolds said.
In order to do their job well, committee members are each assigned seven conferences to watch throughout the season.
“You have to be the expert on the seven conferences you’ve been assigned to,” Reynolds said. “It’s almost like a second job because from November until March you are studying the teams in that conference and not only those teams but other teams in other conferences nationally.”
While monitoring his assigned conferences and other potential at-large teams, Reynolds watched so many basketball games last season he said he couldn’t count them all.
“Obviously you can only watch one game at a time,” Reynolds said. “During the course of the year, particularly on a Saturday, you can sit in front of the TV and watch games all day. I like to watch them live if I can.”
One resource the committee uses is Synergy, a platform that cuts all the commercials, timeouts and delays in a basketball game. Committee members are then able to watch a full game in 40 minutes.
According to Reynolds, a lot goes into the selection and seeding decisions. The NCAA’s new NET Rankings are one part considered, but not the only factor.
“You also have to keep track of injuries because that serves as a mitigating factor if a team lost a couple games but maybe their top player was out for some reason,” Reynolds said. “You have to keep track of all those things.”
While selecting and seeding teams, Reynolds said it is important for committee members to know their facts.
“There’s a lot of debate and discussion because I may believe a team should be ranked higher than another committee member,” Reynolds said. “You have to be armed with information and you have to do your homework as it relates to why you rank certain teams where you rank them. It’s not just in my gut I feel this team is better than another.”
The committee members are sequestered in New York City the Tuesday before Selection Sunday to complete the bracket. Luckily for Reynolds, the MVC men’s basketball tournament is the weekend before.
“What makes it great is I can actually be in St. Louis with our team during the conference tournament,” Reynolds said. “Some athletic directors and commissioners on the committee don’t get to be a part of their team’s run through their conference tournament.”
Despite Arch Madness taking place before the committee is in New York City, Reynolds does not have the day off.
“After we played our final game and won and celebrated, I had to go do a conference call,” Reynolds said. “I was all set up in a room in St. Louis at the arena and joined the full committee during the call because we still had a lot of work to do as it relates to preparing for the upcoming week.”
As the No. 15 seed, Bradley got the draw of No. 2 Michigan State in the tournament and Reynolds was not involved in Bradley’s seeding.
“Whenever Bradley is being discussed, I can’t be in the room at all,” Reynolds said. “Even though I wasn’t involved in any of the discussions, certainly in the back of my mind when we were discussing teams and seedings, I was thinking about where we will be seeded because particularly for a school like Bradley, being seeded as high as you can is really important.”
Overall, Reynolds said he enjoyed his first of five years on the committee.
“My understanding of the process was somewhat limited because you really don’t know to a full degree how teams are selected and seeded until you are in the room when it’s actually happening,” Reynolds said. “It’s one of the best professional experiences that I have had in athletics.”
