NCAA disbands selection committee, defers to Joe Lunardi

For its 2014 men’s college basketball tournament, also known as “March Madness,” the NCAA has announced a major change in its selection and seeding process.  Philip Timmerman, the NCAA’s Director of Tournament Seeding, stated that this year “the selection committee will be disbanded, and the NCAA will simply defer to the selection, seeding, and placement decisions of Joe Lunardi.”

Joe Lunardi is an ESPN analyst who, in recent years, has predicted the tournament field with surprising accuracy.  “In most years, Lunardi was already predicting 63 or 64 teams of the then 65-team field, and was also amazingly accurate on both seeding and geographic placement of those teams,” Timmerman stated.  “It doesn’t make sense for the selection committee to continue to meet in a small conference room year after year, just to keep reinventing the wheel.  We always end up doing what Lunardi recommends anyway.  Or maybe it was like he was reading our minds and just beating us to the punch.  Regardless, this change will streamline the entire selection and seeding process.”

In related news, violence erupted before Saturday’s North Carolina–Duke game.  Unlike recent NCAA incidents, however, this one didn’t involve players or fans.  Instead, it was ESPN college basketball analyst Jay Bilas who aggressively ripped fellow analyst Digger Phelps’s pink fluorescent highlighter from his hand, snapped it in half, and forcefully stuffed it into Phelps’s mouth.  “I can’t stand that guy constantly matching the color of his highlighter to the color of his necktie,” Bilas explained.  “It’s so obviously a desperate grab for attention.  It just makes me so angry.  I finally had to do something about it, and I don’t regret it.  I just wish we could get Bill Raftery back to replace this guy.”

ESPN immediately announced that no disciplinary action would be taken against Bilas.  In a brief statement, ESPN president Thomas Cleery III concluded that Bilas’s action, while aggressive, was warranted.  “Phelps had it coming,” Cleery said, and added that Phelps, who suffered only minor injuries to the mouth area, had been warned by ESPN on several occasions to “stop that ridiculous and embarrassing practice of color-coding his obnoxious necktie to his absolutely unnecessary highlighter.”