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INDIANAPOLIS -- You can forgive the NCAA for worrying that fans don't understand its tournament selection process very well. They're right. We don't.

So, in the interest of education, the NCAA hosts a mock selection committee every year in which it invites 20 media members to a room designed to look exactly like the room in a downtown Indianapolis hotel where the committee meets. Monitors and a projector screen fill the space, as faux committee members like myself peck away on laptops, calling up loads of statistics to compare every possible team with its NCAA tournament -- or maybe NIT -- competitors. Argument abounds. Participants work late in to the night. Dinner is served, free time is minimal. Eventually, a bracket, built as though the season ended on Wednesday night, is born.

This process is grueling. It's also complicated. It's also very, very fun.

By the end of our two days, we had a 65-team tournament schedule built out of the countless votes and ranks we took on just about every team in consideration for an at-large berth. It was seeded and scheduled as well as possible; observing tournament scheduling rules while also making these puzzle pieces fit was perhaps the most frustrating part of the exercise.

The reason the NCAA does this exercise is obvious. Every year, the committee is criticized for one thing or another -- too few mid-majors, or too many East Coast teams, or too many teams that have to travel too far in the first rounds of the tournament. The mock selection committee is the organization's way of proving to its media members that stuff happens, that the process is very challenging, that conspiracy theories don't actually exist, that the field is seeded benevolently and without cynicism.

After participating for a day, I'd say the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The job is neither as difficult as the NCAA would have you believe -- after all, you're just seeding a basketball tournament -- nor as easy or laden with conspiratorial convictions as most fans might assume.

Here are five other things I learned from my two days in Indianapolis:

1. The actual process is made much, much easier by computers. Just like every other aspect of life, right? It's hard to imagine the committee doing the job it currently does without the internal software the organization developed, because the process is that painful. How does it work? The committee starts by selecting a group of teams it considers locks for an at-large bid, which go into one pile. Then, the committee creates a pool of teams worthy of consideration but who aren't obvious locks, which go into one pile. Then, over the course of the next two days, the NCAA's software takes these teams and creates list after list for the committee to vote on -- many times asking committee members to vote on the same teams several times. Through these votes a rankings system is eventually created, and the teams are delineated from 1 to 65. (This also includes the occasional audible for when a new conference tournament result -- which our exercise simulated -- is given to the room.) Without the automated system -- with, say, paper ballots that had to be drafted dozens of times -- the process would be that much more difficult to get one's head around. That software makes the voting profoundly easier.

2. There's no accounting for taste. There are rules that the committee follows throughout the process. There are also suggestions. Sometimes, it feels like these two things get confused. For example, if one committee member thinks a team's last 12 games are worthwhile to look at, he may do so despite the NCAA's new memo that a team's last 12 games should mean no more than any others. This is how the committee works. Some are "basketball people." Some are not. Some members value RPI above all else. Some stubbornly watch as many games as possible, ignoring stats along the way. Some glance at Pomeroy's tempo-free rankings. (Well, I was, at least.) And some just look down a team's schedule, citing big wins and notable losses along the way. It would be a very bad thing everyone was so qualitative, just as it would be bad if the tournament was seeded according to RPI alone. This balance leads to argument, but it's also what keeps the committee fluid.

3. NCAA selection committee chairman? I'll pass. After all this argument and debate, a bracket is born, and each member has a mere 1/10th share of the blame for that bracket. Did a marginal team you didn't vote for sneak in? Did a No. 1 seed inexplicably fall out of grace? Tough; it's time to get on TV. If you're committee chairman Mike Slive, you then have to take that bracket -- parts of which you might not have voted for -- and immediately defend every part of it on the nationally televised CBS selection show. This is a brutal job, one a $75 per diem -- which each committee member receives for his or her work -- doesn't nearly make up for.

4. Sorry, Northwestern. If you thought the selection committee was going to give Northwestern special consideration as an at-large this year, you're wrong, and that goes for any team with a compelling story or history to make. When this came up in committee, NCAA vice president of basketball strategies Greg Shaheen says that same question comes up in the real committee, and told us that committee members are directed to ignore outside factors like Northwestern's historical failure to reach the NCAA tournament. The committee, he said, "is not here to make history," but to seed the best 65 teams in the tournament. The committee is human, so one can imagine its members occasionally (and perhaps unconsciously) bending this rule, but sorry, Northwestern fans. No special love for you.

5. Polls, polls, polls. Before Thursday, I didn't know the committee looked at not two but three polls in its consideration for the tournament -- the AP poll, the coaches' poll, and a poll run by the National Association of Basketball Coaches in which one coach from each of the 31 conferences ranks 15 teams in his region. This poll was created because coaches complained they didn't have enough of a "voice" in the committee room. After two days of looking at teams, I can safely inform you that our committee didn't look at any of these three polls once. This strikes me as a good thing -- polls are dumb, and shadow polls completed by 31 coaches in regional fashion are even dumber. We have far better ways of seeding the NCAA tournament. Fortunately, we use them.

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I am drunk with power.

OK, not really. One of the first few things you learn about being a "member" of the selection committee -- as part of a yearly simulation run by the NCAA wherein a group of media members act as pretend tournament operators, going through a condensed version of what the real selection committee will do in a month -- is that you're kind of powerless. Not entirely powerless, of course; if you're vocal, you can be a difference-maker. But you quickly learn that there's no accounting for taste, and that's as true in basketball as it is in anything else.

Does your fellow committee member hate RPI? Does the chap across the table think Purdue is a No. 1 seed? And just who put North Carolina in the "considerations" pile, anyway? Deal with it, deal with it, and -- well, OK, that last one is ridiculous. You don't have to deal with that.

These are the things we spent most of Thursday balancing. If there's one major thing I learned about the selection committee in our first day, it's that this is how the NCAA likes it. There should be disagreement. There should be an RPI-obsessed guru in the room. There should be your classic, even stubborn "I know because I watch the game" guy down the table. There should be an informed member willing to discuss why, say, the quirks of Illinois's schedule hurt its case for an at-large bid. The NCAA wants this balance, wants it to fluctuate from year to year, and if that balance produces a choice that horrifies your brilliant basketball mind, well, tough. You're just one committee member. You did your best. Now live with the result.

It's been a fun process so far, but we have lots of work ahead today -- we still need to seed a whole mess of teams, as well as adjust our inclusions based on new fake conference tournament "results" coming in -- so let's keep moving. For now, here's a few other rambling thoughts from the first day of my turn as a fake selection committee member. For a full chronology of what the committee actually did all day yesterday (which teams were included, which ones were ranked, and which ones are still on the board), see Lexington Herald-Leader writer John Clay's blog, as well as the full summary on NCAA.com.

• The NCAA keeps the process straightforward, sort of. The actual physical process of deciding on teams is rendered in a computer program run by the NCAA. Committee members are given a secure laptop with access to an intranet program that runs "elections" -- the process by which committee members pick the best eight teams from a large pool, vote on them, eventually rank them, vote on them again, rank them again, and so on and so forth. The common analogy in the room yesterday is that the process is like peeling an onion away. There's plenty of overlap -- you're likely to see each team several times -- That said, the way the NCAA organizes the information it gives to committee members, many of whom might not take a regular look at the RPI and other factors, can occasionally be confusing. Once you get used to it, it's fine. But the NCAA's "team sheets" -- a breakdown of each team's record, schedule, RPI, key wins, and a variety of other categories -- aren't the easiest to read or most visually appealing documents in the world. It would be easy to see why a committee member uninterested in the RPI or "numbers" in general would quickly get frustrated and eschew that process. Hopefully this doesn't happen, but you can see why it would.
• This hasn't been an issue practically, but it was brought up early in the process, and I had no idea this happened: The NCAA asks its committee members to consider three polls: The AP top 25, the ESPN/USA Today, and another poll you've never heard of. It's called the NABC regional advisory committee poll. It's a poll created by 31 coaches, one from each conference, that asks each coach to rank 15 teams from his region. NCAA senior vice president of basketball and business strategies Greg Shaheen said the poll was created because coaches were concerned that they didn't have a voice in the committee room. Does this poll play a large role? It's hard to say. We rarely, if ever, looked at the AP or the ESPN/USA Today poll, and though we didn't have access to the regional advisory poll and wouldn't have been able to look at it, it's hard to see any reasonable committee spending more time looking at that than at, you know, RPI, strength of schedule, etc. Maybe it happens. But it seems doubtful.
• Does the committee care about tempo-free? Kind of, but not really. Ken Pomeroy's invaluable efficiency ratings are explicitly listed in the "resources" section of our committee materials, alongside Sagarain ratings and Jerry Palm's CollegeRPI.com. But they're listed last, and in our committee, which is made up of media members who write about basketball numbers for a living (and not, you know, conference commissioners and athletic directors), Ken Pomeroy's stats came up maybe once or twice. (They did play a role in the committee recognizing Marquette was this year's most unlucky team, but we might have reached that committee Pomeroy-or-no.) In other words, while the burgeoning tempo-free statistics movement has made major inroads in college basketball media, but it doesn't have much of a place in the committee room. Sad smiley face.
• Our group has thus far been very civil. It's easy to see how things could quickly go downhill -- you're stuck in a room poring over repetitive minutiae from early in the morning until late in the evening -- but our group has exactly zero jerks in the room. Discussion has been robust but never angry or frustrated. This makes things much, much easier. (And really, if you can't have fun talking about college basketball and the NCAA tournament, what's wrong with you?)
• Shaheen and other NCAA officials ended the day yesterday with a discussion of how, in the past 10 or 15 years, the difficulty in distinguishing between the final 10 or so teams in the tournament has become more and more difficult. It's interesting -- even as the technology improves and makes the committee's actual physical task easier, the amount of information available keeps increasing, thus making the consideration process for each team longer. (Oh, and it's a nice little way of segueing to 96 teams, which is a likely topic of conversation today. I'll update once that happens.)

We're thick in the throes of arguing over the last few teams in, so I should stop typing, but in case you're curious about the exact step-for-step process the committee goes through, here's the same document of principles and procedures we received and reviewed before beginning yesterday. We've heard plenty about the NCAA's desire to increase the selection committee's transparency, so it doesn't need to be repeated again, but keeping documents like this public is a good way of doing so.