King Kaufman's Sports Daily
The NCAA Tournament news, as always, is who'll miss out: Too many smaller-conference teams. Plus: Amaechi's endorsement.
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March 12, 2007 | Forget Selection Sunday. We ought to start calling it Snub Sunday.
Every year 65 teams are named to the NCAA Tournament field and all anybody wants to talk about is who got snubbed. I don't know whether that says something about human nature or the collective American personality, but if you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.
Syracuse is the big snub this year, with lots of little snubs adding up to the selection committee giving a big middle finger to the mid-size conferences. Drexel, Air Force, Missouri State and Bradley lead the field of the so-called mid-majors who were left out as only six teams outside the major conferences got at-large bids, down from eight a year ago, nine in 2005 and 12 in 2004.
Detect a trend there? Me neither, but I'd thought things were getting better for the non-majors, not worse. The medium-conference snub is even more surprising given the 2006 Tournament, when Colonial Athletic team George Mason electrified the nation by going to the Final Four and two teams from the Missouri Valley Conference, Bradley and Wichita State, made it to the Sweet 16.
That run, which helped make last year's Tourney one of the best ever, was enough to turn CBS chatterers Jim Nantz and Billy Packer into veritable boosters of the smaller conferences this year.
Packer usually contents himself on Snub Sunday with apoplectic defenses of ACC teams that didn't get a fair shake despite finishing in a 58th-place tie in the conference with a brutal road schedule, but last year he went ballistic when he saw that four teams from the Missouri Valley Conference had made the field and major-conference mediocrities like Cincinnati hadn't.
"You've got to be kidding," he sputtered. The preternaturally bland Nantz even showed some spit and joined in.
A week later, after Bradley, Wichita State and George Mason had advanced, Packer admitted he'd been proved wrong. And boy, there's no zealot like the convert. Sunday Packer, with Nantz nodding alongside, grilled selection committee chairman Gary Walters: Why so few mid-majors this year?
Walters said the committee is interested only in teams, not conferences.
"Our job is to recognize that once conference play is over, every team becomes an independent," he said. "So our job is to compare and contrast all the teams regardless of conference affiliation. We adhere to that principle." He said committee members didn't even count up the number of major and non-major schools in the field until its task was completed. It just works out some years that there are more non-major-conference teams than other years, he said.
Next page: Committee should err on the side of smaller conferences. Plus: John Amaechi gets an endorsement deal