David Worlock admitted selecting teams for the NCAA Tournament is not an easy task.

As the associate director of the men’s basketball championship, Worlock said the committee has been forced to make plenty of tough decisions.

However, a few ACC coaches have not been happy with the recent decline in ACC schools advancing to the tournament.

“There’s no question that the league has been slighted,” Florida State coach Leonard Hamilton said in a teleconference on Feb. 19. “Why? I have no idea. It seems as though there has been a very aggressive attempt to include teams that for one reason other folks thought have been slighted.”

The ACC has had the most teams in the NCAA Tournament and has had the best winning percentage in the history of the NCAA Tournament.

Between 2001 to 2004, the ACC averaged five teams a year into the tournament. During 2004, the last season before expansion was complete in the ACC, the conference had six teams enter the tournament — five of the teams were seeded No. 4 or higher, including N.C. State.

During that NCAA Tournament, the conference had three Sweet 16 teams and two Final Four teams. Even though Georgia Tech would lose in the finals to Connecticut, the ACC finished the tournament 14-6 — the conference hasn’t had a losing record in the tournament since 1987.

Since that postseason, and even since expansion was complete in the ACC, the NCAA selection committee has not invited as many schools from the conference. In 2005, the conference received five bids and then last year it only received four.

While Hamilton said he wasn’t sure what exactly went through the committee’s thought process, he said the he believes the factors are ever-changing.

It seems as though every year there’s some more emphasis placed on certain things,” Hamilton said.

“I hear this year, and I don’t know how true it is, one of the committee members made the comment that they’re going to place more value on postseason conference play — and I just found that out.”

But Hamilton’s solution to the problem is simple — win as many games as possible and try to schedule appropriately.

For Worlock, he said the invites have nothing to do with the conferences. After the teams who win their conference championships are in, it comes down to the “best 34 at-large teams,” according to Worlock.

“We don’t say ‘Do we really want to take FSU because we already have seven ACC schools?'” Worlock said.

“We don’t say, ‘We have to take X-amount of teams from this league or X-amount of “mid-majors.”‘ We want to know who are the 34 best at large — worked out last year that we had four ACC teams. That’s who the team felt was the best 34.”

He said the committee will compare teams. Not necessarily within the conference, but just rank possible NCAA Tournament teams amongst each other.

It’s a process that occurs often too. Basically, when a committee member wants to see how a team stacks up against other teams, the committee compiles all sorts of information — all in less than a minute.

“Show me Villanova, Gonzaga and Bradley. And in a matter of 30 seconds, they’ve got markers, they rank them and it gives them a cheat sheet — it ranks all wins, losses, where they’ve played,” Worlock said. “We never look at an entire league and compare it to another league.”

But the ACC dilemma is a topic that Worlock said “is getting talked about a lot in the press.” One main thing he said the committee now has to focus on is the conference schedule.

While “smaller, midmajor conferences” play a traditional round-robin format — one home and one away against every conference opponent — larger conferences aren’t doing the same.

“In conferences like the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, a 10-6 may look better to a naked eye than 8-8,” Worlock said.

“But 8-8 may have been achieved against the upper half of the conference. The 10-6 could be from teams against bottom half of the league. A lot more attention has to go into that with expansion of conferences.”

While Maryland coach Gary Williams didn’t want to take direct aim at the topic, he did hint that the conference should get more recognition. He said in the past, the “best conferences” have had more invites.

Williams said it’s tougher for conferences like the ACC because every day the teams take a “physical pounding.”

“It wears on you,” Williams said. “You might lose a game that you might not lose that you didn’t have to put up with that every time you walk on the court.”

This season, Williams said the conference has “pretty good statistics to support the ACC this year,” and that “hopefully they’ll speak for themselves.”

“There’s facts out there about RPI’s and things like that anybody can see in terms of the league,” Williams said. “I know in the past, what were considered the best conference, or the best conferences, have gotten seven teams in, eight teams in.”

These stats are what Hamilton hopes can help the conference and maybe even help propel his Seminoles into the tournament.

“We definitely have eight or nine teams that are more than qualified to play in the NCAA Tournament,” Hamilton said. “Whether or not that is something that becomes a reality, who knows.”

The process

Once the doors close, the selection committee gets to work — and it’s a very stressful time, according to Worlock.

The 10-member panel will sit down and start breaking down teams nearly a week before Selection Sunday. They start with every single independent school in the country, Worlock said. Many days the group goes 12 hours straight, from 1:30 p.m. to “well past midnight.”

While a lot of decisions are made early in the week or before Sunday because the majority of conference championships have been completed, Worlock said being that a few conferences play their conference championship on Sunday afternoon, the decision process becomes tougher.

During last season’s Big East championship, No. 9-seeded Syracuse didn’t have much of a shot at the NCAA Tournament; however, it went four days and won four games — clinching a berth. It’s championship victory was that Saturday.

“We knew Saturday night, ‘OK, Syracuse is in,'” Worlock said.

A day later, other conferences started their championships. While Worlock said the majority of the tournament was decided, he said a lot can change if a game goes unexpectedly.

“In the SEC last year, when Florida was playing South Carolina, Florida was in. South Carolina had to beat Florida to get in. If South Carolina would have pulled that off, an at-large team would be out.”

This isn’t something that starts last minute or just one week before the selection. It goes on all year long. Throughout the year, the committee members attend games, watch games on television and actually report back to the committee and submit online information. This is what Worlock called the “conference monitoring system.”

Committee members have primary and secondary leagues that they are intended to look over.

Then it comes to reporting the loads of information. The group considers good losses, bad losses, injury reports and much more. The injury reports are something Worlock said the committee takes heavily into consideration.

“If someone had six games with a leg injury and the team went 1-5, but won seven of eight since returning, we’d take that into consideration,” Worlock said.

Many committee members will have their own sheets which state the teams they believe “will get in, the teams that are close and the teams that still have work to do.” Information sheets are prepared for all these teams, which can be upward of 100 — all that have a “chance of being discussed.”

When it comes down to the last few teams to get into the tournament, Worlock said he is confident his group will make the correct decision.

“We’re armed with information — as much information as possible,” Worlock said.