It's easy to mistake numbers for science.

The NCAA tournament selection process -- in particular, this final week of agony before the conference tournaments crown their champions and Selection Sunday makes its glorious return -- is inherently awash in numbers. The Ratings Percentage Index is the big one, the figure that structures and underwrites everything the committee does in the room between now and Sunday (whether the NCAA always likes to admit it or not).

But as the RPI is sliced and diced to create other categories -- from strength of schedule to top-50 wins to bad losses to conference strength to, well, you name it -- it can give a casual fan the general impression that tournament selection is a matter of rigorous data collection and analysis. Add in the selection committee's usual excellence in selecting the field, the typical predictive success of bracketologists like our own Joe Lunardi (and countless others) and the forgiving nature of the 68-team bracket, and it's easy to think the committee constructs the tournament in academic fashion. Team X meets A criteria? They're in. Team Y doesn't? They're out!

To the contrary: Tournament selection is much more like art. There is no golden ratio or Fibonacci Sequence to apply here, no one set of obvious and elegant rules that governs what the committee chooses to do when it gets down to the last three or four of the 37 at-large selections. This is partly because the committee uses a flawed metric in its deliberations (the RPI is outdated and mostly dumb but, well, let's not go down that road again). But it's mostly because the committee comprises living, breathing humans, all with their own preferences and tendencies and post-lunch food comas and specious arguments and powers of persuasion. The RPI can make the committee room seem like a distant, calculating being unto itself, a hoops HAL 9000. In reality, it's more like "12 Angry Men."

And each committee's members are different. Some may value their own "eye test" more than they should. Some may rely solely on the RPI. Some may be inherently inclined to give a middling high-major team -- as opposed to a shaky mid-major with a gaudy record -- the benefit of the doubt. Or vice versa.

In the big scheme, this doesn't add up to much: With 68 teams in the field, and only one champion to crown, the chances the committee's varied whims will change the course of the tournament are always slim. But as VCU showed us in 2011 -- and George Mason proved in 2006 -- the difference between an historic Final Four run and a trip to the NIT can, every once in a while, come down to some seemingly indistinguishable and confusing differences.

How will the committee weigh such factors this year? Which criteria, if any, will come to define the teams that either make or miss the 2012 NCAA tournament? We don't know. But for fun -- and to highlight some of the contrasts the committee will be examining as it convenes in Indianapolis this week -- we figured we'd have a little fun with a timeless bubble endeavor. You know what it is: blind résumé time!

In each of the three charts below, we compare a handful of current bubble teams side-by-side based on their RPIs, strength of schedule numbers, records in road/neutral court environments, and records against teams ranked in the top 50 and top 100. These are, for better or worse, the big ones -- the data points the committee most frequently cites as its most important. As you'll see, distinguishing between the "best" and "worst" résumés can be a frustratingly opaque, inherently subjective, ordeal.