The NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament selection process involves choosing 65 teams to participate. 31 teams qualify automatically based on their conference championships, while 34 teams are selected at-large based on their Rating Performance Index (RPI) which considers a team's winning percentage, strength of schedule, and opponents' strength of schedule. The selected teams are seeded and placed into the tournament bracket, which is finalized before play begins. There is discussion of expanding the tournament field to 96 teams in the future.