On the annual “Selection Sunday,” when the brackets for the NCAA basketball tournament are announced, commentators such as Dick Vitale rant on and on about other teams that should have been selected without naming the teams to be replaced.
However, I recognize that the committee has a lot of work to do, and that it is difficult to decide which teams deserve to make it the tournament.
For example, is a small school that has never played a top-25 team better than a school that has a losing record in the best conference in the nation? It is often hard to tell.
In addition, the 64-team bracket has to be seeded and split up into 16 “pods,” which cannot contain more than one school in a given conference, and no team can have home-court advantage nor should a low-seeded team have more of an advantage than high-seeded teams.
Aside from a couple seeding peculiarities, I only have a problem with one of the committee’s actions: that Air Force not only got an at-large bid, but they got seeded 11.
This means that the committee considers the Falcons to be one of the top 44 teams in college basketball despite their RPI rating of 70.
I realized that they finished 22-6, but with an RPI rating like that to go along with it, they clearly had some serious weaknesses.
Four of the losses came in the last 37 days of the season. One was to Texas-Pan American, which finished 13-14 with a No. 213 RPI rating.
Another loss was in the first round of the Mountain West tournament to Colorado State, which had won only four conference games in the regular season. CSU also finished with a losing record, and they are rated 130th.
The other two late-season losses were to UNLV, which has an RPI of 80, and BYU, which is a 12th-seeded at-large team.
Their only impressive win in that span was by two points at Utah, which LSU, who lost in the first round of the NIT, beat.
Air Force was only 8-5 on the road this year. Maybe that’s why the committee scheduled them to play in Denver, which is in their home state.
This is not right either.
I think Missouri would have been a better choice. Not only do they play in a much better conference (the Big XII), but they also finished their season stronger.
Since its loss at Nebraska, an NIT team, on Feb. 7, the Tigers’ only regular-season losses were at Texas Tech (an eight-seed in the tournament) and to Kansas (a four-seed).
Although Missouri only finished 16-13, they likely would have done better against Air Force’s schedule than the Falcons did.
Missouri, which has a 51 RPI ranking, was 8-0 against teams rated 100th or lower. One of their weaknesses was a 6-4 record against teams ranked between 50th and 100th, but Air Force was only 2-3 against such teams.
In addition to beating UNLV by 34 in the last month of the season, the Tigers also beat Colorado, another “bubble” team, and Oklahoma State, which won the Big XII tourney after being seeded second in the NCAA tourney.
Other teams ahead of Air Force in the RPI (with seeds in parentheses): Northern Iowa (14), Central Florida (14), Pacific (12), East Tennessee State (13), Murray State (12), and Virginia Commonwealth (13).
Those are all decent teams, but none would have likely made the tournament without winning their respective conferences.
