Selection Sunday is the day when the NCAA College Basketball tournament participants are announced, placed and seeded accordingly. The NCAA committee gathers to select and place 65 men's teams and 64 women's teams that they deem worthy of an invitation to the NCAA Men's and Women's basketball tournaments that take place in March and April.

The field consists of the following:

• Automatic bids — These bids, 31 in all, go to conference champions. Of these bids, 30 go to conference tournament champions. The Ivy League is the only conference that does not conduct a postseason tournament; in that conference, the regular-season champion receives the automatic bid. Most conferences have their tournaments on the week preceding Selection Sunday. The NCAA reserves the right, at the beginning of the season, to revoke the automatic bid of minor conferences. The number of conferences now is sufficiently small, though, that the NCAA is not expected to exercise this right in the near future.

• At-large bids — These are schools that the NCAA selection committees (separate committees for men and women) deem worthy of a tournament bid. The men's tournament has 34 at-large bids available; the women's tournament invites 33 at-large teams. A few basketball-intensive athetic conferences traditionally earn at least 4 bids each in the Men's and Women's tournaments: the six "major" conferences of the Big East, ACC, Big 10, Big XII, Pac 10, and SEC. The selection committee takes great care, however, to treat teams from "mid-major" and "minor" conferences fairly.

Selection Sunday is a day of anxiety and excitement for College Basketball fans and players throughout the country.