NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Committee chairman Dan Guerrero said today that selection officials try to avoid sending teams -- such as No. 4 seed Maryland -- far from its campus and fans.
"Sure there is always is an attempt," Guerrero said on a media conference call, to place teams "as close to home as is reasonably possible."
I asked Guerrero specifically about Maryland, which was sent to Kansas City last season as a No. 10 seed and is going to Spokane, Wash., this season.
He said things become complicated "when you have muiltiple teams from the same conference" in the tournament because those teams can't be bunched together into the same sites. The Atlantic Coast Conference has six representatives in the tournament.
"One of the things that comes into play, however, and we've spoken about this on many occasions, is the whole principle and procedures policy that we must follow," he said.
I asked Guerrero whether the committee considers recent history of individual teams. Would it seek to avoid sending the same team a long distance several years in a row?
"We actually do look at that. We look at the history of the last several years to determine if, in fact, a team has been, for lack of a better word, disenfranchised," he said.
"The bottom line is I know Maryland also played in Washington, D.C., a few years ago. It just so happened that that is the way it happened out in this particular year."
The Terps played in the District of Columbia in the first and second rounds of 2002.