While the Bowl Championship Series remains a favorite punching bag for college sports fans, the NCAA basketball tournament selection committee also serves as a time-tested target for rage and frustration.

The unveiling of the 68-team tournament field last March was met, as usual, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth over who made it, who didn’t and why a team had a certain seed or opponent.

Jeff Hathaway, who replaced Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith as selection committee chairman this year, tried to get ahead of the grief yesterday by pointing out in a conference call how difficult it will be to determine a bracket of 31 automatic qualifiers and 37 at-large selections.

“There are more better teams this year than ever before,” said Hathaway, a consultant for the Big East. “That doesn’t mean there are more great teams, and it doesn’t mean there is more parity. Frankly, there’s just a lot of very good basketball teams out there playing very good basketball, and that adds to the challenge of the 10 members of the committee.”

The NCAA has tried in recent years to make the selection process more transparent, through media opportunities such as yesterday’s conference call and a two-day mock selection seminar that The Dispatch was invited to participate in today and Friday.

This year, the NCAA has added links to its website that rank teams by the Rating Percentage Index, a mathematical index used by the committee. Anyone can go on the site and see the same team “sheets” that committee members will pore over next month.

Still, rest assured that someone will be upset when the tournament bracket is announced on March 11. Although the committee follows procedural guidelines, the overall process is subjective, with no priority placed on certain criteria.

“Each committee member evaluates in his own way and votes how they see fit,” Hathaway said.

And that includes using the “eyeball test” as well as statistics such as RPI, strength of schedule, opponent strength of schedule and wins vs. top 50 programs.

“We need to go beyond the numbers,” Hathaway said. “Each individual committee member needs to assess what the eyeball test means to them.”

The subjectivity caused Virginia Tech coach Seth Greenberg to wonder last year if “the human element” and “politics” played a part in his team being rejected despite having a better RPI ranking than the last four at-large teams picked: Virginia Commonwealth, Southern California, Clemson and Alabama-Birmingham.

Virginia Commonwealth then advanced to the Final Four.

“One of the greatest misconceptions I’ve heard over the years is that there are conspiracy theories,” Hathaway said, “that we match up certain teams and set the bracket a certain way. One thing I can unequivocally say is that there are no conspiracies.”

There are, however, three new members to the committee: Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione, Louisiana State athletic director Joe Alleva and West Coast Conference commissioner Jamie Zaninovich.

Returning to the committee are Xavier athletic director Mike Bobinski, Wake Forest athletic director Ron Wellman, Southern Methodist athletic director Steve Orsini, Utah State athletic director Scott Barnes, Texas-San Antonio athletic director Lynn Hickey and Big Sky Conference commissioner Doug Fullerton.

No radical changes were made to the selection process. Hathaway said a team’s body of work is considered by the committee, not how a team fared down the stretch.

“A big win is a big win, any time, any place,” Hathaway said. “The season starts in November and goes through the conference tournaments. We look at every game.”

Conference affiliation and polls don’t matter to the committee. Neither does history, which means struggling Butler won’t be cut any favors just because it played in the past two NCAA championship games.

“The basic premise of the selection committee is: ‘Who did they play? Where did they play them? How did they do?’ ” Hathaway said. “There is no magic number in any way, shape or form.”

And there will be no magic answers for the selection committee to offer when the ever-increasing bubble bursts for certain teams in 24 days.

tjones@dispatch.com