Craig Littlepage Quotations

On a personal level, I've known Jon since his days back in the '80s as a staff member of the ACC. He's a guy who listens, processes information and then, I think, makes very good judgments in terms of the things we may be discussing at a particular point in time.

One person might rely on (RPI) heavily and another might rely on it less heavily.

Personally, I would be resistant to that and I believe that in listening to my colleagues on the committee, there doesn't seem to be a lot of momentum in that direction. I think that over the last two years there is a certain magic that has evolved over the course of this tournament, and I wouldn't want to fool around with that in the short term in regards to expanding the field in any way.

No. 1, it means they are a very big conference, and more importantly, it means they have a very good conference.

One of the committees' primary objectives over the last few years has been to increase the transparency and understanding regarding the process of selecting teams for the tournament. We think that announcing the results of the RPI ranking on a weekly basis has its benefits.

I'd be a little surprised to learn of any top-level program in the area that didn't highly consider him for a job.

If a situation is tight, if we're comparing six to eight teams, and two of those six to eight teams have put together a schedule with rigor, and they've been balanced in terms of playing games both home and away from home, the tiebreaker in that kind of situation is going to go with the teams that have scheduled and have challenged themselves.

I think it certainly crushes the notion that you can't look at the numbers and be able to accurately reflect who's a good basketball team and who's not. You need to take a step back and not look at mere brand recognition, if you will.

I think it's pretty doggone solid, that's for sure.

I think we are comfortable that the modifications have done a lot of what we had hoped. I would think that one of the unintended consequences ... would encourage teams from other parts of the country to play away from home.

I think that would be a pretty strong resume & for the University of Virginia, for Maryland, for Colorado, for whoever the school might be. That sort of profile in our level of league, I believe, would be a good resume.

Some of the losses that took place ... it certainly does open up the opportunity for teams in the postseason tournaments to solidify a 1-seed or maybe to open the door for other teams.

I think if there is a message to relay today, it is too early to say what will happen. Every conference still has important games to be played.

You have to face the reality that teams have conference records. So our job is to dig beneath the surface, even among teams that have the same conference records in some conferences.

We put together what I think is a really solid and really diverse field for this year's championship.

There have been some unbelievable stories, great drama and great individual and team performances. But we are continually reminded that the evaluation process is not complete.

We had a discussion and the questions that asked were similar to 'Who is tough?' or 'Who is another team you wouldn't want to play? Air Force provided us with some unique things.

We felt their non-conference could have been a little more challenging, a little more rigorous. But we believe their seed was a solid seed.

There's still several games and in some cases several weeks yet to go plus conference tournaments so the evaluation process is not anywhere near to being completed. If there is a message to be relayed today, it's that it is still too early to say what will happen.

These schools are just buying games, buying wins. That's not fair, and it's not what's good for college basketball. ... There has to be some reward for people willing to play a good schedule and realizing that when you play good people, you're going to win some and you're going to lose some. We should reward the people that are willing to challenge their teams.

I wanted a coach whose team would rebound relentlessly. And they rebound the heck out of the basketball.

After the automatic qualifiers are named, conference affiliation really plays no part of the process. Teams are evaluated on what they have done regardless of what conference they are in.

Coach Groh has provided strong leadership for the university's football program, and we want to ensure continuity in its future academic and athletic successes.

It?s a number of sports. Any of the sports that play on grass would be under consideration.

It's much like the question about injuries - it has to be considered, it has to be brought up. The committee member who has the monitoring assignment for that team and for that conference would be obliged to bring that to the attention of the committee.

In terms of what we saw in the Big East, it created some very tough questions for us, specifically the imbalanced scheduling. At the end of this process we felt the eight teams that were selected were very good teams.

He's one of the best coaches in the country, in my opinion.

The discussion about any one league will not go into our discussions when it comes time to select the at-larges. We are going to look strictly at teams, what teams have done.