King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Stop whining about the Tournament! Cincy got shafted, Air Force got lucky, and that's good. Plus: Blown call helps U.S.
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March 13, 2006 | Selection Sunday has come and gone and oh, the agony. The crying, the whining, the gnashing of teeth and stomping around. Not fair, not fair, not fair!
I'm talking about my 3-year-old, but while I'm thinking of it, did you catch Jim Nantz and Billy Packer on CBS?
The Eyeball's NCAA Tournament selection show has become first-class entertainment over the last few years because no matter what happens, Packer will find some reason to get red in the face and sputtery over the shabby treatment of poor, downtrodden, underrated conferences like the ACC.
If he's not offended by some medium-conference interloper getting too high a seed, he's miffed by an insufficient number of big-conference clubs getting in. Even when he's right, his arguments are so ridiculous and his apoplexy so grand it's the funniest show on TV.
I seem to remember my grandpa having a similar reaction to any mention of Herbert Hoover's name.
This time Packer and Nantz, along with a healthy percentage of the commentariat, were upset that several seemingly undeserving small- and medium-conference schools got bids at the apparent expense of big-conference bubble teams. The selection committee was populated this year by a smaller-conference majority, so conspiracy talk raged.
Again, all of it probably as correct as it was silly.
The gate crashers: Air Force, George Mason, Utah State. The aggrieved: Maryland, Florida State, Michigan, Cincinnati. And just to complicate things, Missouri State and maybe Creighton, from the medium-sized Missouri Valley Conference.
Oh, the crying and wailing, the spluttering rage! I just took some scissors away from the kid, but we were talking about basketball. Try to focus.
"If it's supposed to be the best 34 [other than conference champions], there's no way that Cincinnati should not be part of the dance," Dick Vitale said on ESPN about what he thought was the biggest snub. The Bearcats would have been the ninth Big East team in the Tournament.
"If you take the Utah States of the world," he asked, "and put 'em in the Big East, do they go 8-8? I have a little bit of a doubt."
Well, that makes one of us. I say there's no way Utah State goes 8-8 in the Big East, as Cincy did. In fact, Utah State, Air Force and George Mason might combine for eight wins in the Big East. If any of those teams played Cincinnati 10 times, they'd be hard-pressed to win three.
But here's the really important point: So what?