By DOUG IRELAND, Journal Sports
MINNEAPOLIS – It’s Wednesday morning, March 30. Greg Burke is having breakfast in Minnesota, site of the Women’s Final Four.
It was also in the heartland, three weeks ago, that Burke and the other 11 members of the NCAA Women’s Basketball Selection Committee met for five days and culminated five months of skipping sitcoms and miniseries to watch telecasts of games from Pepperdine to Portland, from Miami to Monmouth, from New England to the Rio Grande. Sequestered at NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis, they crunched numbers, selected the sport’s first 68-team field (matching the men’s bracket, a recurring theme this year), and set a bracket that has three of the top four seeds in the Final Four.
Since breaking out of the conference room with bracket in briefcase March 13, he’s barely been home in Natchitoches. The former Northwestern State director of athletics got back to Cane River country for 48 hours, then drove south a modest 180 miles to help oversee the Baton Rouge regional pod, which had one of the four new Opening Round games before the First and Second Round pairings.
He hurried back just long enough to get clean clothes, then jetted up to North Carolina to work the Greensboro Region Sweet 16, unsurprisingly won by No. 1-ranked South Carolina.
There was a surprise, however. It came from the other two committee members on site who told him that, by an insurmountable 2-0 vote, he had been given the distinction of running the postgame regional trophy presentation. So there was Burke, nearing the final steps in his 44-year career in intercollegiate athletics, handling the mic on national TV, presenting the prize to coach Dawn Staley and her team.
“It was an honor, with me rolling off the committee this spring,” said the ultra-modest Alliance, Ohio native. “It was a very nice moment. I was proud to represent the conference and Northwestern State.”
It is only the second year on this NCAA selection committee for Burke, serving as the Southland Conference representative. He spent four years on the NCAA’s FCS selection panel and several more seasons making trips to serve as a site supervisor for playoff games. He’s also worked on an NCAA academic reform group. He’s the kind of by-the-book, minutia-minded administrator ideally suited for those roles, and he relished the opportunities.
Even when, in his rookie season with the women’s basketball championship last March, COVID-19 protocols compressed the entire tournament to San Antonio and up I-35 to San Marcos and Austin. Burke and his colleagues were all but locked down for 27 straight days, eating boxed meals in their hotel rooms, and adding a degree of difficulty nobody ever imagined.
“This year, we’re back to normal for the most part,” he said, “but the demands in terms of time commitment haven’t changed that much. We’ve been able to get out to dinner occasionally, but otherwise, there’s not time for anything outside our duties.”
This tournament has featured more fantastic finishes than the usual quota, but it has lacked the off-court drama which plagued last year’s event. There’ve been few, if any of the ample complaints from student-athletes that erupted last year, calling attention to issues and inequities tolerated for years.
“It’s a fair statement to say strides have been made,” he said, noting the NCAA commissioned an exhaustive outside comparison of operations for the men’s and women’s tournaments. “It pulled the curtain back on some things that needed to be addressed. The experience in our tournament for the participants this year is improved in so many aspects, and it’s noticeable.”
Affirmation: for the first time, the NCAA uses the trademarked “March Madness” brand for the women, too. There was resistance, but that barrier tumbled while participants and fans are getting much the same experiences as their counterparts participating in the men’s tournament.
That and many more tangible enhancements have made Burke’s swan song all the more rewarding for him, and all involved. When he heads homeward next Tuesday, he’ll have a championship glow.
“There’s still work to be done,” he said. “I’m confident it will be incrementally better next year.”
Then, someone else will do it. Burke won’t be scrambling around the country, grinding through 18-hour days in March. He’ll be watching ESPN from his easy chair, savoring friendships formed and March Madness memories made, worrying only if it’s time for the lawnmower to come out of storage.