Last year, not knowing if they had done enough to make the NCAA Tournament, the Arkansas basketball Razorbacks loaded up on a plane to head back to Fayetteville from Atlanta.

They felt they had done enough, winning five straight before losing to Florida in the SEC Tournament championship earlier in the day, 77-56.

Still, a 7-9 finish in the SEC’s regular season was plaguing the Hogs.

While in the air that Sunday afternoon, the Razorbacks knew their NCAA Tournament chances were also floating somewhere in the clouds. Ten NCAA Selection Committee members held their postseason fate. The field was taking shape as the Hogs were traveling, and somehow Arkansas managed to squeak in as a 12 seed.

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The Arkansas coaching staff made the announcement to the players as their plane landed at Drake Field.

“ It was exciting, ” senior Vincent Hunter recalled.

Later today, though, Arkansas won’t be in a plane when the NCAA Tournament field is announced at 5 p. m. on CBS. After playing in the SEC Championship game at 2: 30 p. m., the Hogs will stay grounded to see where they end up.

“ Oh, we’re going to see it, ” Arkansas head coach John Pelphrey said. “... That just means we’ll leave on a later flight. ”

They also won’t be so unsure whether they’ll make the postseason like in 2007. A 92-91 win over No. 4 Tennessee to advance to today’s SEC Championship game all but assured placement.

But where will the Hogs end up in the NCAA Tournament ? Will they stay close to home and travel to Little Rock for a first and possible second round game in the tourney, or will Hog fans have to travel as far as Providence, R. I., to see their favorite team go for its first win in the tournament in nine years ?

And how will that be decided ? History says Arkansas’ probable inclusion into the Big Dance and site-placing will provide an inconsistent answer. THE ART OF PROJECTING

Dozens of so-called experts have prognosticated for weeks. Almost daily, one team is in the NCAA Tournament, another is out.

A team’s seeding goes up and goes down faster than the stock market. The projected location of a team’s first-round game changes almost hourly on Joe Lunardi’s “ Bracketology” on ESPN. com — one of the most popular Big Dance projectors.

Nothing is constant, but thousands of fans still clamor for any insight or information. They discuss the latest projections on Internet message boards and on sports talk radio. In essence, hours are wasted until the final bracket is announced by the NCAA on Sunday.

Talk of teams on the “ bubble” fill the airwaves. Fans and “ bracketologists” break down numbers, wins and losses. Even a team’s injury situation comes into play.

There’s more acronyms and terms flowing out of fans’ mouths in February and March than possibly any other sport during any other time of the year.

“ RPI” stands for Ratings Percentage Index.

“ SOS” means strength of schedule.

“ The bubble” signifies a group of teams that are on the cusp of entering or falling out of the NCAA bracket.

All are repeated thousands and thousands of times by TV analysts, newspaper columnists, fans and talk show hosts.

The terms have bled so thoroughly through the fabric of basketball, even members of the 10-person NCAA Selection Committee toss the term “ bubble” around this week, chairman Tom O’Connor says.

“ It’s a cute term and everyone uses it, so we might as well use it, ” he reasoned Wednesday during a conference call with the media.

Some times all the hubbub gets ridiculous, admits ESPN analyst and University of Arkansas graduate Jimmy Dykes.

“ Is my team going to get in ? ” Dykes said, impersonating any one of the dozens of fans he encounters while on the road. “ That’s the No. 1 question that gets asked in gyms, hotel lobbies and all over. But that’s what makes March Madness.

“... It’s a guessing game. Everybody has their opinion. There’s no rhyme or reason, and until that bracket comes out, it’s just a general fan’s guess. ”

Dykes said he felt Arkansas was safely in the NCAA Tournament field before the Hogs’ win over Vanderbilt on Friday. Part of that reasoning comes from teams on the “ bubble” being very weak this season.

“ It’s just not a very strong group of teams, ” Dykes said. “ I think there’s probably seven or eight teams fighting for three or four spots. ”

Teams like Baylor — which Arkansas beat on a neutral floor — Arizona State, Illinois State, Kentucky and a load of other squads are fighting for a postseason shot.

Jerry Palm, owner of CollegeRPI. com and a writer for CBS College Sports, has come as close as correctly projecting the field than most. In a typical year, “ I miss one, ” he said. During a weak, upand-down season in 2006, he missed three.

This year, he said, is very similar to 2006.

“ The middle of the major conferences are generally not too strong and, unlike in 2006, there aren’t many nonmajors stepping up to make strong cases for those spots, ” Palm said.

The field in 2007 was pretty strong, though. Arkansas squeaked in with a 21-13 record, forcing out teams like Syracuse, which had a 22-10 record.

Experts questioned the Razorbacks’ inclusion.

ESPN analyst Dick Vitale was visibly upset with the exclusion of Syracuse and placement of Arkansas over the Orange last season during a broadcast. After all was said and done, the Razorbacks became just the second team in SEC history to receive an at-large bid with a 7-9 regular season record in conference games.

This year, in a weaker field, teams with mediocre records such as Arizona (18-14 ) and Ohio State (19-13 ) are still holding out hope today for NCAA Tournament life.

“ That Syracuse team would be in this year’s tournament easily, ” said Gary Parrish, writer for CBSSports. com. “ This year’s depth in the bracket just isn’t there. Teams that didn’t get in last year would get in this tournament. ”

O’Connor says he takes offense when he hears experts calling this year’s bubble teams weak.

“ I just think there’s a lot of good basketball teams out there, ” said O’Connor, who also serves as athletics director at George Mason University. “ Anybody that’s saying there’s this ‘ soft bubble’ is maybe a backhanded slap at that team’s coaches and especially [to ] student-athletes that really had a good year.

“ If you look at it as a whole, and take a step back, of all the teams that have been successful, I think it’s a pretty darn good year of basketball. ” PROPER PLACEMENT Today, O’Connor and the

er committee members will decide who gets in and who’s left out of the field. That much is known. But what will really take some time will be seeding and placing teams at the various first- and second-round sites. The top five seeds in each region usually get some advantageous treatment by the committee. The NCAA began using a “ pod” system in 2002 to help alleviate some travel problems for most teams, not even necessarily the top five seeds. Beforehand, teams were sent to a certain site and advanced to a coinciding region after first- and second-round games.

Denver, one of the eight sites this year, would have most likely just placed teams into the west region of the tourney, but with the introduction of the “ pod” system, the site will host both east and south regional teams in the first and second round.

The new system has helped Arkansas at least once. In 2006, the Razorbacks were placed in Dallas for a first-round game — a mere 271 miles from the University of Arkansas campus. Last year, though, the Razorbacks were forced to travel to one of the furthest sites it had in its NCAA Tournament history. As a 12 seed, they traveled 1, 433 miles to Spokane, Wash.

The chances of Arkansas receiving a high enough seed to be placed in Little Rock for a south regional may be possible with a win in the SEC Championship game. With a placement in Little Rock, it would become the closest regional placement to the UA campus since the Razorbacks traveled 193 miles west to Oklahoma City as a No. 1 seed in 1994.

The next closest site this year will be held in Omaha, Neb., which is 372 miles from the UA campus.

The committee developed a temporary bracket Wednesday night, O’Connor said, which has been tweaked and discussed from the committee’s headquarters inside an Indianapolis hotel.

Seeding and placement are some of the last things finalized by the committee Sunday.

“ There’s so much that we have to study — the sheets that we have on each team, the data that we have on each team, ” O’Connor said. “ People get hung up on the RPI, but the RPI is really a starting data control point. ”

The committee uses the RPI, which is based off a team’s winning percentage and that team’s opponents ’ winning percentage. Arkansas sits at No. 24 as of Saturday evening.

Other factors are looked at as well, such as the Razorbacks’ record in their last 12 games and their record against teams in the RPI Top 50.

Prior to Saturday’s win over No. 4 Tennessee, prognosticators grouped by The Bracket Project — a Web site that samples more than 50 bracket “ experts” — has Arkansas averaged to be a No. 9 seed in this year’s tournament.

“ You’ve got some studio guys, and they’re very good, but there isn’t some magical criteria of what it takes to get in, ” said Parrish of CBSSports. com. “ They’ll say, ‘ If you have a certain record in your league or if your RPI is this, you’re in. ’ The reality is, the tournament isn’t like that. The best 65 teams have to make it, and that’s it. ”

With numbers floating around in cyberspace and in fans ’ minds today before the field is announced, reality gets lost.

Arkansas center Darian Townes said he isn’t sweating Selection Sunday, or keeping up with the latest NCAA Tournament field projections.

“ I did at one point, but now it’s gotten to the point that I don’t even watch it any more. It’s crazy, ” Townes said. “ It comes down to the committee and those guys to pick. If we make the tournament, hey, that’s great because the season goes on and we get to keep playing basketball. ”

Townes’ head coach understands the situation. He’s been through NCAA Tournaments while at Kentucky, and he knows what’s approaching the senior and his teammates.

“ For an athlete, the hardest thing to deal with is when it’s over, ” Pelphrey said. “ It’s hard regardless, but it’s really difficult when it ends on a loss. We’re getting ready to enter the period of time right now where there’s only going to be one team that ends the season with a win. We’re all going to deal with it. It’s hard. ”

And projections, at the end of the day, won’t mean anything.