Four Teams With Every Right to Be Furious at the NCAA Selection Committee
Selection Sunday always leaves someone angry. This year it left four teams with a proper case, and the numbers behind each one are hard to argue with.
Only two at-large spots were realistically up for grabs once the ten automatic qualifiers were set. They went to North Carolina and Massachusetts. North Carolina even got the No. 8 seed, ahead of Duke. That is the decision everything else has to be measured against, and for four teams the measurement doesn’t add up.
Wake Forest: better numbers, beaten head-to-head, still out
Start with the Demon Deacons, because their case is the cleanest. Wake Forest finished with an RPI of 0.605, tied for ninth in the country. North Carolina’s was 0.604. That’s a small gap, but it points the wrong way for the committee’s story, and it gets worse. Wake Forest beat North Carolina head-to-head in Chapel Hill, a week before the regular season ended, and finished with a better record too.
The selection show host explained Penn State’s omission by saying their RPI had “caught up to them”. Wake Forest’s RPI was higher than the team that got in. Late-season form is supposed to matter to the committee as well, and beating the team that took your spot, on their own pitch, a week before the season ended, is about as late-season as it gets.
Penn State: the win that apparently didn’t count
Penn State finished 12-6, ranked No. 12 in the RPI at 0.603, and beat the No. 1 team in the country and two-time reigning national champions in the regular-season finale. They still missed out for a fourth straight season, and they were the first team mentioned on the selection show when the committee talked through the sides that didn’t make it.
The Nittany Lions won four ranked games and went 8-1 in October alone. They were also one of only two teams all season to beat Lafayette, who finished with a higher RPI than UMass and are in the tournament on an automatic bid. The only other team to do it was Northwestern.
Here’s the contradiction. UMass got in with an RPI of 0.601, lower than Penn State’s. If Penn State’s RPI was the problem, that doesn’t work. Seven teams ranked below Penn State in the RPI earned automatic bids by winning their conference tournaments, which made the Nittany Lions the top team left out. Old Dominion’s Big East title win over UConn probably cost them their place, and that’s the cruelty of the bubble. But the committee’s own explanation doesn’t survive contact with its own numbers.
Liberty: better record, head-to-head win, tougher schedule
Liberty barely got a mention on Sunday night, which is strange, because their case is right there. They finished with a better record than North Carolina and beat them head-to-head. They also played a tougher schedule than both Wake Forest and Penn State, and their RPI of 0.599 sat within 0.006 of the four teams genuinely in the bubble conversation.
That’s close enough to justify an at-large pick on any reading of the numbers. Instead, RPI worked as a convenient reason to leave them out, while it was ignored for the team that got in ahead of them.
Syracuse: in the tournament, still hard done by
Syracuse actually made it, which makes their grievance the oddest of the four. They finished with a better record than North Carolina, beat them in the ACC Tournament semifinals, won the ACC title outright, and had a higher RPI. Guess who got the No. 8 seed, and guess who didn’t get seeded at all.
North Carolina did beat Syracuse in the regular season, but Wake Forest’s head-to-head win over the same team apparently counted for nothing, so it’s hard to see why that one should have counted for everything. And there’s a darker reading for Syracuse: had they not beaten Boston College in the ACC final to earn the automatic bid, they might not have made the field at all.
North Carolina’s own resume has a hole in it too. They lost to a Michigan side that finished 6-10, missed the Big Ten Tournament entirely, and won one Big Ten game all season. That loss barely seemed to register.
What happens now
The tournament starts Wednesday, and there’s a neat twist waiting in it. A potential Northwestern against North Carolina quarterfinal is on for Sunday 15 November, if the Tar Heels get past Miami of Ohio first. Northwestern are the defending champions and the No. 1 seed. Wake Forest, Penn State, Liberty and Syracuse will all be watching. You’d forgive them for hoping.
