Time to start dancing

On a teleconference Sunday night, NCAA Tournament selection committee chair Tom O'Connor reviewed the list of elements that made this Selection Sunday zanier than most.

There was the high volume of upsets across the country that muddled the seeding and bracketing of teams. There was the tornado that crashed into the Georgia Dome on Friday and forced the Southeastern Conference to play its tournament under unprecedented circumstances.

There were the eight contingency plans the committee developed to prepare for Sunday's possible upset.

"There was a little bit of a time crunch at the end," O'Connor said. "It was a little more stressful."

Yet by 2:40 p.m. (PDT), the committee had delivered a 65-team NCAA Tournament field that college basketball fans will celebrate, analyze and debate until play begins with Tuesday night's opening-round game.

And the excitement figures to continue until April 7 when the NCAA crowns a new champion in San Antonio.

North Carolina, Kansas, Memphis and UCLA are No. 1 seeds in each of the tournament's four regions. All four teams captured their conference tournaments this weekend and won or shared the regular-season crowns in their respective leagues.

The Tar Heels, the tournament's overall No. 1 seed, will enjoy the luxury of playing each game until the Final Four within their home state.

"It's an advantage if you play well," UNC coach Roy Williams told the Associated Press after Sunday's ACC tournament final. "Just because the crowd is cheering for you, I've never had a crowd win a game."

A slew of other teams with far weaker credentials than the top seeds filled out the field's final slots. Oregon and Arizona, Pac-10 teams that lost 13 and 14 games, are in the tournament. Villanova gave the Big East a record-tying eight teams in the field, and St. Mary's and St. Joseph's got Palm Sunday gifts by sneaking in with at-large bids.

Others with decent profiles were left out. Virginia Tech finished 9-7 in the No. 1-ranked Atlantic Coast Conference but didn't earn a bid. Illinois State, Virginia Commonwealth and Arizona State didn't reach the field either. And this year's tournament lacks both Florida and Ohio State, the teams who faced off in last season's national championship game.

O'Connor said on the teleconference that a team's performance away from home, particularly in nonconference play, helped determine its fate.

"A sign of a good team is winning on the road," he said. "If you get a good team to go on the road and play quality teams and they win those games, that's important."

But not every team in the field got here thanks to a stellar regular season. Coppin State, which started the year 4-19, swept through the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference tournament to gain an NCAA automatic bid.

Then there's Georgia, which won four SEC games all regular season before winning four to take the conference tournament. Thanks to foul weather and damage to Atlanta's Georgia Dome, the Bulldogs won those tournament games at two different sites and took two of them in an 11-hour stretch Saturday.

"It's been unbelievable," Georgia center Dave Bliss told reporters after the SEC final in Atlanta. "I mean, it's just so rewarding."

Georgia's presence in Sunday's SEC final, plus Illinois advancing to face Wisconsin in the Big Ten championship, forced the committee to design several potential fields. Both the Bulldogs and Illini would reach the tourney with wins; neither would play on with losses.

At the end, Georgia was in and Illinois was out. And a few minutes after 3 p.m., CBS broadcast the field to the nation, ending a most stressful of weekends for O'Connor and his men.