Want to be on the NCAA Selection Committee? Hope you know a way to cram 30 hours into a 24-hour day. We spent a day with West Coast Conference Commissioner and NCAA Selection Committee member Jaime Zaninovich to get a feel for what's involved in his job. (2:41)

LAS VEGAS -- Jamie Zaninovich turned on his laptop at 7:45 a.m. on Saturday and opened a color-coded spreadsheet that featured a ranking of all the teams he believes are still in contention for invitations to the NCAA men's basketball tournament.

"I want to show you this," he said to a reporter and cameraman who had invaded his spacious suite at The Orleans Hotel & Casino. "But don't get too close with the camera."

Zaninovich, the West Coast Conference commissioner and a member of the 10-person tournament selection committee, has developed his own personal college basketball ranking system, not unlike what you would see from the major media "bracketologists." His personal prioritizing of six different measures and metrics, however, is not for publication. It's for his own personal use with the selection committee.

"I weigh the different ranking systems and I put them into my own composite ranking," he said. "I can immediately see if something jumps out -- 'Look, they are only 1-4 in top-50s."

Zaninovich was preparing for an 8 a.m. conference call with committee members, his 29th such teleconference this season. A very long day in a season of long days is just beginning. Zaninovich's "day job" is pretty demanding, and the WCC men's and women's basketball tournament at the Orleans, which ran from Thursday to Tuesday, is the conference's biggest and most important event. It features 18 basketball games, and Zaninovich will watch just about every one of them. He also will take care of sundry administrative duties, conduct media interviews and preside over inductions into the conference's Hall of Honors, all the while trying to keep up with college basketball's twists and turns across the country.

You've got to be a basketball junkie to do this.

-- WCC commissioner Jamie Zaninovich

After the WCC tournament ended on Tuesday night, he took a red-eye to Indianapolis, where he will cast his first ballot for the 68-team NCAA tournament bracket on Wednesday. He and the other nine members of the committee then will hole up in a hotel for the next five days through this coming Selection Sunday.

It will be basically selection and seeding each day from 8 a.m. to perhaps as late as 11 p.m. Committee members get breaks to eat catered meals and work out and keep up with the various conference tournaments, but otherwise it's voting and discussion, voting and debate, and then filling out preliminary brackets until the official announcements on CBS.

"Once you get there, it's intense," he said. "It's dynamic, it's relative and it's complex."

It also requires an extraordinary time commitment for roughly four and a half months in advance of the committee meeting. Zaninovich, who has a wife and two young sons, said he spends about five days at home in March. His time management is better in his third year of a five-year term on the committee than it was in his rookie year, but adding 25 hours a week of watching and analyzing college basketball outside your bailiwick as an athletic director or conference commissioner means little down time.

And watching a lot of basketball.

"You've got to be a basketball junkie to do this," he said.

Jamie Zaninovich takes in the quarterfinal action at the WCC tournament with his son Max. Chris Kalohn/ESPN

While sitting courtside and watching San Francisco have its way with San Diego during the opening game on Saturday, Zaninovich had four other games going on his laptop: Oklahoma State at Iowa State, Pittsburgh at Clemson, Texas at Texas Tech and Oklahoma at TCU.

He's heavy on the Big 12, because it is one of the three primary conferences he is assigned to monitor, along with Conference USA and Southland. But he'll watch no fewer than 12 different games on his laptop this day. He even checks in on Duke-North Carolina on his iPhone.

Tennessee is blowing out Missouri. Says Zaninovich, "This is an important game."

Arizona State loses at Oregon State. Says Zaninovich, "I'm not surprised ... Arizona State is not very good on the road."

He's asked what Arizona's loss at Oregon means. Says Zaninovich, "A lot of basketball left."

When Oklahoma State's four-game winning streak ends in overtime at Iowa State, it's a missed opportunity for the Cowboys. But Zaninovich emphasizes it doesn't fall into a major category that can move a team's estimation significantly up or down: A big road win or a bad loss.

"Oklahoma State losing a tight one at Iowa State is neither," he says.

While Zaninovich's college basketball immersion on this day is significant, it's not total. Because he's away from home so often in March, he's brought along his family, which includes wife, Karen, and sons Max, 7, and Lucas, 5.

Max shares his father's passion for hoops, and he sits transfixed much of the day. It's difficult not to take note of the poignancy of the scene, with Zaninovich, arm around Max, explaining the game's nuances. These father-son moments, however, are even more meaningful than they normally would be. The previous week, Zaninovich buried his father, George, a former political science professor at Oregon who played basketball at Stanford in the 1950s.

"In some respects, it's good to be busy at a time like this," he said. "I'll take my moments when I need them."

Zaninovich grew up watching games with his father at Oregon's celebrated McArthur Court, "running around the third balcony as a kid."

"He's where I got my passion for basketball," he said. "I don't think I'd be sitting here if he didn't instill that in me."

Jamie Zaninovich's role as a committee member requires him to follow games at all times. Chris Kalohn/ESPN

Zaninovich's preparation for his third year on the committee began in November after he received his list of primary and secondary conferences (Pac 12, Big West, Summit and Big Sky). He and his WCC staff put together a spreadsheet of every game in those conferences that will be on TV -- date, time and station -- in chronological order. Slingbox and DVR are essential tools for committee members.

He also saw teams firsthand at a number of early-season tournaments -- the Champions Classic in Chicago and the Maui Invitational in Hawaii during Thanksgiving weekend -- as well as a number of Pac-12 home nonconference games. He keeps track of how often he sees each team. If he hasn't seen a team, he makes plans to see it.

He's not much into preseason previews, nor does he pay much attention to early-season "bracketology."