Triangle spot swap on NCAA’s top hoops group: UNC’s Cunningham replaces Duke’s White
Kevin White never really got his moment in the spotlight as chairman of the NCAA basketball selection committee. The Duke athletic director would have been quizzed on CBS after the field was announced on Selection Sunday, but the cancellation of the tournament wiped out what everything he and the rest of the committee had been planning for a year.
As White moves on, his five-year term complete, the Triangle will remain amply represented on the 10-member panel that picks the 36 at-large teams, seeds the field and oversees the massive logistical enterprise that is the tournament and Final Four. The NCAA announced Thursday that North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham will start his five-year term on the committee in September, a like-for-like swap of ACC representatives from the same area code.
“I’m certainly excited about it, just honored to be considered for it and be a part of it,” Cunningham said Friday. “It’s such a great event that funds the whole operation of the NCAA, basically. You grow up watching the tournament, now to be a part of it’s exciting for me.”
That’s the only turnover on the panel going into next season, with Kentucky’s Mitch Barnhart serving as chairman for the 2021 tournament. But it’s a critical role in the college basketball world, with responsibilities that go beyond selection. Working closely with the NCAA’s basketball staff, committee members are present at all eight first-weekend sites and supervise everything from repairs to the playing surface to which officials advance to the next round.
As for selection, each committee member is assigned conferences to monitor throughout the season, which means the job of picking the field begins long before the committee is sequestered in a hotel conference room overlooking Times Square to make its final decisions. (This turned out to be especially convenient for White, whose term on the committee overlapped with the two years the ACC tournament was in Brooklyn.)
Cunningham has been intricately involved in the process as the athletic director of a repeat Final Four team and as a host school, which made him a natural candidate for consideration as a committee member — a role he’s thrilled to take on.
“It’s one of the pinnacles of the things that we do in college sports,” Cunningham said. “You’re part of the tournament for an extended period of time as a participant, and somebody’s running it. We hosted first and second round when I was at Tulsa and got to know some people both on the committee and on the staff. From time to time you think, ‘Oh, that would be fun,’ but then you move on to doing your own job. So it’s an honor. And I’m really, really looking forward to it.”
But having a representative on the committee is no guarantee that a school or a conference will be treated favorably. Members have to recuse themselves when their team or league is up for discussion, although there are always conspiracy theories about ACC athletic directors on the committee who have helped or hurt the selection or seeding. Most memorably, Seth Greenberg pointed a finger, indirectly, at committee member and Wake Forest athletic director Ron Wellman after Virginia Tech was left out in 2011 for the second straight year.
“You almost wonder if someone in that room has their own agenda and that agenda doesn’t include Virginia Tech,” Greenberg said back then. “Just plain and simple. I totally wonder it, if someone in that room has an agenda. The explanation was so inconsistent with the result that it was almost mind-boggling.”
It’s certainly a job that invites criticism. But it’s also an important one in the world of college sports, with a responsibility to make sure an event as complicated and expansive as the Final Four runs as smoothly as it typically does. Cunningham, through his experience as a participant, knows that’s no accident.
“There’s so many details,” Cunningham said. “It’s like everything else: It looks fairly easy or simple on the outside, and then the more you get involved, there’s more details, more things you didn’t even think about being discussed. That’ll be interesting to learn.”
