They will emerge sometime Sunday from the New York Marriott Marquis, a committee of 10, having concluded more than 96 hours of deliberations to fill the 68-team bracket for the N.C.A.A. tournament. They will have tallied each team’s Quadrant 1 victories, parsed their R.P.I. rankings and agonized over their “body of work.”

What will not have been discussed is which programs bought their players, and for how much, or the federal investigation underway to determine who, exactly, the bad guys are in college basketball. The selection committee’s chairman, Bruce Rasmussen, promised.

“Our committee is intensely focused on selecting and seeding and bracketing the right 68 teams,” Rasmussen, the athletic director at Creighton, said on Wednesday before going into seclusion with his colleagues. “We’re not going to pay any attention to that because it’s not in the purview of our committee.”

What about the cloud hanging over this tournament? What about — dare I ask — the integrity of the game?