By JIMMIE TRAMEL Sports Writer on Apr 8, 2013, at 10:26 AM Updated on 4/08 at 10:26 AM
ORU SPORTS
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I’ve got a story in today’s Tulsa World that poses the question of whether it’s time to invite regular season champions of every conference to the NCAA Tournament. If that rule had been in place in 2012, Oral Roberts would have been in the field.
Ten mid-major and low-major regular season champs who lost in their league tournaments were left out of the 2013 NCAA field, which means one bad day at the office wrecked a season’s worth of dreams.
Regular season champs not selected for the NCAA Tournament are granted automatic bids to the NIT -- and that’s a good thing, according to ORU coach Scott Sutton, who said some regular season champs otherwise might be completely shut out of postseason.
Sutton didn’t say this, but I will: The regular season champs, after getting snubbed by the NCAA, got no love from the NIT committee. The champs were seeded as if they NIT didn’t want them sticking around.
Let’s see if you agree after reading this:
The NIT seeds participating teams, one through eight, in four regions. Teams with top four seeds get home games. Teams with bottom four seeds get sent on the road.
Care to guess how many of the regular season champs were rewarded with top four seeds? None of them.
Southland Conference champion Stephen F. Austin and WAC champ Louisiana Tech got No. 5 seeds. Every other regular season champ in the NIT got a No. 7 or No. 8 seed, which basically eliminates the possibility of playing a home game in the first three rounds. No. 8 seed Robert Morris, which upset Kentucky in the first round, got a home game only because Rupp Arena (an NCAA Tournament site) was unavailable.
Stephen F. Austin lost a one-point game at Stanford in an NIT opener, so it’s fair to assume the Lumberjacks would have prevailed if the game had been played in Nacogdoches, Texas.
“They put Stanford as a four seed in the NIT and us as a five even though our RPI is higher than Stanford’s,” former Stephen F. Austin coach Danny Kaspar (he took the Texas State job last week) said in a recent interview.
“My theory is those TV people don’t want to land in Houston and drive two and a half hours to Nacogdoches to do their broadcast. They want it easy, so they just go to Stanford, where they have got San Francisco and San Jose and Oakland and all those airports and all those Marriotts and all those Hiltons.”
That’s just Kaspar’s opinion. And I’m not one who easily embraces conspiracy theories. But it’s enough to make you think.
