And we're done! Or at least, we've come to the end of our time in Indianapolis.

This entire mock selection process was in many ways the brainchild of Greg Shaheen, the NCAA's Senior Vice President for Championships and Business Strategies. The feedback he received from the media, imploring the NCAA to offer more insight, more clarity in the selection process, and the US Basketball Writers Association's encouragement pushed the mock selection from idea into reality. Three years ago the men's selection committee debuted the process (the women's side held a round table for the media instead) and last year the women's committee joined the fray.

It was, without question, a good idea. Is it foolproof? No. Does it touch enough members of the women's basketball world to have a deep or immediate impact on the amount of criticism directed the committee's way? Not necessarily, and the men's side has moved to two mock selections into action to reach a broader segment of their community. But it has the potential, and as the selection committee improves the model of the workshop and more coaches, media and other participants get involved, the clarity that fans have clamored for has a fighting chance.

Now, as the rest of the season plays out and the REAL committee convenes in a few weeks, some of us think about who we would like to be party to next year's mock selection. Some of us might appreciate to take a second crack, now that we know if it's seed before site or site before seed and what "list eight, rank eight, move four" really means. But in addition to a further cross section of the media and coaching, why not include Sports Information Directors at various schools? Rick Nixon assured me that was in the works, as are invitations for the conference media relations directors. Beth Bass, of the WBCA, believes as I do that the coaches and media members with the biggest microphones -- the stars of the women's basketball world -- might offer the biggest bank for the NCAA's mock selection buck.

Either way, I have enjoyed the past 24 hours immensely -- it was an inside look at an exclusive process, an educational opportunity that left me with many questions, but a much better base of knowledge to ask them from.

As Sue Donohoe concluded today: We may not agree with the committee's decisions, but we will understand how they made them.

So we didn't complete the bracket in its entirety, but time and flights out of Indy have dictated that we have to wrap up. Rick Nixon just fired his first question:

How did a No. 1 team end up potentially playing a lower seed on its home court?

The room froze. Coale looked perturbed (it falls to her as chairwoman to answer the questions on Seleciton Monday) and the rest of the committee looked like they didn't envy her one bit. With some prodding from the NCAA staff, they tried to escape answering the question -- the complexity of the answer was utterly daunting -- and finally, reluctantly worked out an answer with a combination of pointed fact and platitude.

The questions aren't getting easier, but the committee's finding its rhythm. They're beginning to illuminate the process a bit for the mock media, learning how to back up their decisions with RPI, records, and other data they looked at, but they're also learning that some of these decisions become so convoluted in the process that you can't blame a committee member for stuttering through it. Take that, you can almost hear the real committee members thinking, for all the times they've been approached by an angry fan, coach or player. 

As we get close (or at least closER) to a finalized bracket here, watching the mock committee members vacillate between their roles as coaches, media, WBCA and pretend members of the committee is fascinating. Slo-o-owly they release their grasp on their preconceived notions of what matters to the selection committee (individual RPI does; conference RPI not so much) and accept the rationale behind the principles, no matter how they complicate the process.

The real question from this weekend is this: Can educating this small group on the ins, outs and obstacles of this process change the public's perception of the work the NCAA Selection Committee does?

Coale seems to believe it can. She just set up a closing statment to the mock committee here, wherein she implored the people here to "explain to coaches as clearly and concisely as we possibly can what an arduous task this is and what goes into it...to educate the public on the sincerity of the process." She mentioned the coaches' meetings in St. Louis during the Final Four as a chance to educate their fellow coaches on the process, so that coaches can make educated requests and suggestions to the committee.

Perhaps the most important lesson for all of us in the room was not what we know now, but what we realize we didn't know before we began.

When we started bracketing this morning Sue Donohoe warned us of our mission:

"Provide relative balance to the bracket. Relative does not mean equal...Provide comparable competition within the bracket. Comparable does not mean equal."

I'm not sure we heard her properly, or believed her entirely, when she said it. We can balance the bracket, we optimistically thought, and plowed ahead. And then, slammed up against the (by my count) more than 10 different factors that have to be considered in each and every placement in the bracket, we believe her. Some times really close has to be good enough.

And Donohoe seems to think we're doing well. Though there have been a few tense moments, she claims there hasn't been any blood like the real committee sees. That's small comfort as we work through lunch, dropping the first round sites on top of the bracket positions we've already picked.

This tightrope walk of bracketing isn't getting any easier. Some of the questions the committee has debated:

How does a new piece of news about a team (like an injury) effect the seeds we set up last night? How does a seed change in turn affect their place in the bracket?

Do we move an 9 seed to a 10 seed and force them to play a 7 just to keep them from facing an 8 seed they faced in the regular season?

How much can we consider predictions, if at all, of the outcomes of these games? (Madam Mock Chairwoman Sherri Coale put the kibosh on that one: "Our charge is not what they're capable of but what they've done.")

How do we value our responsibility to grow the game and keep attendance numbers up with favorable sites relative to following the principles and procedures that keep this process as objective as humanly possible?

And when do we break for lunch?

There was some comfort in the rigid procedures of the selection and seeding process -- most decisions came down to head-to-head comparisons of teams as we listed eight teams, ranked the eight teams that were listed most, and advanced the four highest-ranked teams into the tournament pool or into their seeds.

Now we've hit the proverbial fan. On paper, the process of bracketing the teams seems straightforward: Take each team in seed order and put them in the closest Regional location available when their number comes up. A cinch, right?

Forget it. Because now the full weight and difficulty of this process has descended upon the committee. Once we take a good look at the options available to us we want to go back and change the seeding to make the geography easier (a no-no -- seeding and bracketing are meant to be seperate, and teams would certainly hate to lose a better seed for the sake of someone else's better site). Or we run up against the principles of bracketing (for example, no more than two teams from a conference in one region, unless they have nine teams). Only the principles that cause the most chafing are brought up to be changed in June, and they absolutely cannot be changed during the process of bracketing to bail us out of a tough decision. Any violations of the principles have to be defended by the committee, and this mock committee is ironcially hesitant to damn the principles and do the bracket as they chose.

Case in point: We are placing teams in the bracket in the real regions for this year's bracket: Trenton, Raleigh, Oklahoma City and Berkeley. But right away, attempting to place our top four overall seeds in order we got stuck with one team traveling several thousand miles to their Regional. The mock committee tried to backpedal, then took a left turn into a discussion about how scheduling dramatically affects your seeding and then your place in the bracket, and came back to suck it up and leave that team with a hefty travel expense.

The only comfort is that this bracketing program alerts us when when run afoul of a principle, and gives us an automatic read on how many miles these teams will be lucky -- or unlucky -- to travel. If only luck had anything to do with it!

...well, one of the men and women, at least.

One of the most amazing elements of this selection process has been the computer program the committee is using to keep track of the voting, selection, seeding and bracketing of the teams. It is a proprietary program designed by a programmer on the IT staff at the NCAA named Colin Chappell. He made an appearance early on Thursday, but I don't think we realized his true genius until we had thoroughly explored the program over the course of the day.

Chappell built the program several years ago but has been tweaking it into its current state, where the program can manage all elements of the selection process, from field-building to bracket-printing. The program even knows the many principles and procedures of the bracketing ("Conference teams shall not meet prior to the regional final," for example) and will offer an automatic alert to the committee that their placement has created a potential conflict.

Chappell has also offered his talents to the Regional Advisory Ranking system, and he worked with the conference monitoring system that provides the Nitty Gritty data to the selection committee. Without these programs, this involved process would be downright arduous. A salute to you, Mr. Chappell.

Clutching our coffee after a late night of seeding, the mock committee has reassembled for breakfast at the NCAA national office. Last night the NCAA staff completed our seedings based on RPI in order to accelerate the process and allow us to focus on bracketing today.

Reviews of yesterday's experience have been universally positive. Though there was a fair share of jokes about RPI's REAL relevance to the voting ("Heck, at this point I'm just seeing numbers and ranking them in RPI order!") or the sheer stamina needed to make it through the days ("What does Sue Donohoe run on?") you can tell that the experience is making an impression.

Today, we bracket. Bring on the debate.

An intrepid member of our selection team here asked if once the seeds start taking shape, keeping the inevitable host sites in mind, whether the committee is ever moved to change a team's seeding for geographical/ticket sale purposes.

"We might want to do it, but we wouldn't do it," Donohoe assured us. Once the seeds are voted in, it would take a vote of seven of ten committee members (and presumably a rationale other than ticketing) to change a team's seed.