“When I reflect back, I feel good about the work we did and the field we put out there,” Dan Guerrero, chairman of the NCAA selection committee, said Monday. “And I assure you, it’ll be a fantastic tournament.” Which could be true, even if many of the teams making up the 65-team bracket, especially the 34 at-large teams, were less-than-inspiring.
A combination of factors led to this field, which has been roundly panned by commentators and columnists, including Dick Vitale, Jay Bilas and the AP’s Jim Litke. Those factors included:
— Down years by five traditional powerhouses—UCLA, Connecticut, Arizona, Indiana and defending national champion North Carolina, all out of the tournament in the same season for the first time since 1966.
— A terrible year in the Pac-10, which placed only two teams in the tournament and none seeded above No. 8.
— Fast starts, followed by sudden downfalls of Texas and Purdue, two serious title contenders that are now considered long shots, at best.
— Upsets in conference tournaments by Houston and New Mexico State that compelled the committee to use at-large bids on UTEP and Utah State, a pair of regular-season champions from conferences that otherwise would have received only one bid.
Virginia Tech and Mississippi State now go down with last year’s Florida team as one of those very rare major-conference teams to win 23 games and not make the NCAA bracket.
Tech became the first team to win 10 in the Atlantic Coast Conference and get passed over—a result of the combination of the weak teams on its ACC scheduling rotation and a ridiculously bad nonconference slate (339th out of 347).
Mississippi State played Kentucky to overtime twice in the past month and was even anointed NCAA-worthy by Wildcats coach John Calipari after the 75-74 win in the SEC tournament final. Again, not enough due to a weak nonconference schedule and some bad, early losses.
Unlike some years past, the coaches of teams left on the bubble were docile.
“I wouldn’t want to take away from any of the teams that made it and the years they had,” Virginia Tech’s Seth Greenberg said. “It’s not right, not fair.”
He still might have been wondering how his team got overlooked while Minnesota slid in as an 11 seed, only minutes after losing by 29 to Ohio State in the Big Ten final—and on the same day Mississippi State lost to Kentucky by one and 24 hours after Illinois took the Buckeyes to double overtime.
There were eight at-large slots given to teams from the smaller conferences. That was double the number of last year, and the kind of thing that used to be celebrated. This time, though, with talk swirling of possible expansion of the field to 96 teams, there was much less room on the pundit side for the come-one-come-all philosophy.
“Can you imagine?” Vitale said. “Talk about watering down a product. Talk about mediocrity.”
Guerrero, however, sounded intrigued by the expansion idea. He said 110 teams finished with 20 or more victories this season.
“Does it cheapen it? I’m not going to say it does at all,” he said. “The possibilities are intriguing when you think about regular-season champions getting into the field, in addition to postseason. That wouldn’t cheapen the regular season, it would make it more exciting. There’s an opportunity to evaluate all those kind of things and see what the impacts might be.”
This year, though, the committee only had to seed 65 teams, which at times seemed like a plenty daunting task.
There were questions about Syracuse being sent out West instead of Duke, and about whether either of them should have been ahead of West Virginia.
There was an issue about whether Northern Iowa, listed 17th in the latest RPI, got snubbed by receiving a No. 9 seed.
Other bubble teams left out included Rhode Island, Memphis and UAB, though it’s hard to imagine they would’ve quieted the complaints about the quality of the at-large field.
In all, business as usual, and the expected reaction from the man in charge of it all.
“I’m not really sure what the general consensus is,” Guerrero said. “I do know that any time a field is put forward, there are always going to be teams elated when the process is completed, and always going to be teams disappointed because they didn’t make the cut.”
