INDIANAPOLIS -- Stopping well short of re-seeding the Final Four, the NCAA Tournament selection committee will attempt to match the country's top-seeded teams in the national title game, starting in 2004.

Under the new setup, the national semifinals will no longer be predetermined as in years past. Instead, the committee will wait until Selection Sunday to match up the four regional brackets.

		I salute the changes made by the NCAA Tournament selection committee to improve the NCAA Tournament. Let's face reality -- the geographic regions have become a farce over the years. Geographically, there have been so many matchups where teams from the East are playing in the South, teams from the West are shipped East, etc. There was often a lack of logic in terms of where teams were placed. So I have no problem with this new approach. These moves are positives, and I applaud the committee for creating these concepts. It's great to see attempts to make the NCAA Tournament, already the best sporting event of them all, even better. More...

The committee wants to create added suspense when the 65-team field is announced. The top two teams -- as decided by the committee on Selection Sunday -- will be placed on opposite sides of the bracket. As a result, the archaic yearly rotation of the regional matchups will end.

The selection committee also decided two weeks ago to drop directional labels to each regional. Instead, the regions will carry the names of the four regional final sites. In 2004, those will be Atlanta, St. Louis, Phoenix and East Rutherford, N.J.

There is no functional change to the 65-team bracket once the seeding and first-round pairings are announced on Selection Sunday. But, prior to Selection Sunday, the 65-team bracket that appears in national magazines and on Web sites will be blank, with no sites attached or predetermined pairings.

If this new method of seeding were applied to the 2003 NCAA Tournament, Kentucky and Arizona would have been slotted on opposite sides of the bracket instead of being matched up in a potential national semifinal. Both Arizona and Kentucky lost in the Elite Eight, but the committee still took heat for placing its top two seeds on the same side of the national semifinals.

The selection committee got rid of the directional names because of the confusion created by the introduction of the pod system in 2002. Teams that played in Spokane, Wash., last year -- Wisconsin and Connecticut -- fed into different regionals in the Midwest and South, respectively.

One possible glitch created by not pre-setting national semifinal matchups is an extra day off should a Thursday-Saturday regional winner match up with a Friday-Sunday regional winner at the Final Four. The NCAA, however, isn't concerned about possible complaints from coaches about facing a team with an extra day off, since there is a week-long layoff prior to the Final Four. Teams already get an extra day off coming out of the second round if they're in a Thursday-Saturday site that feeds into a Friday-Sunday site.

The committee wanted to reiterate there would be no re-seeding after the regional finals. Meanwhile, George Washington athletic director Jack Kvancz left the committee and will be replaced by Horizon League commissioner John LeCrone, which could help the mid-majors.

Big 12 commissioner Kevin Weiberg also resigned from the committee after becoming the Bowl Championship Series chair. Texas Tech athletic director Gerald Myers replaced Weiberg. Iowa AD Bob Bowlsby is the new chair of the committee, replacing Arizona athletic director Jim Livengood. The 10-person committee is considered one of the most powerful in college athletics.

Andy Katz is a senior writer at ESPN.com.