(01-05-2016 01:42 PM)perimeterpost Wrote: The MAC was the only conference in the top 12 last year not to have an at-large bid. CMU was the MAC regular season champ and MACC runner-up but killed any chance for at-large consideration with a down right awful OOC schedule.
CMU's OOC schedule with RPI last season ('14-'15)-
W 127 Northwestern
W 274 Grand Canyon
W 279 McNeese St.
L 288 Bradley
W 291 Youngstown St
W 292 SIU Edwardsville
W 301 AR Pine Bluff
W 339 Maine
The MAC regular season champ played 1 team in OOC with an RPI better than #274, I wouldn't be surprised to see a MACC runner-up again this season with a similar problem, given how poor the SOS is of a lot of teams at the end of OOC play this year.
You argument makes perfectly good sense and is almost surely the exact same argument the selection committee would use. But I am jaded enough and cynical enough to believe that with all those big bucks riding on the NCAA Tournament the selection committee (which is dominated by the representatives from the majors ---usually coaches along with a few mid-majors reps usually conference officials, not coaches) is always given enough criteria available to pick from so there will always be at least one good reason that they can focus on in order to justify excluding almost any mid-major. This is important enough to repeat: to wit, the system provides the selection committee with enough criteria and with enough discretion and subjectivity on how to apply those criteria on a case by case basis that they can always find at least one reason to justify rejecting almost every good mid-major team----if is not SOS, then maybe RPI, or late season loses (such as in their conference tournament), or bad losses which is essentially any conference loss for a mid-major but not usually so for the majors, or lack of "good wins" (for which mid-majors have fewer opportunities to try for),etc, etc. They only need to find one negative to focus on in order to justify exclusion. It is a high $$$ stake game and the deck is stacked in favor of the big boys just as neatly in MBB as it in FB.
Obviously the majors are going to have more good teams than the mid-majors but the majors consist of about 100 of all the teams playing Division I BB yet they typically get around 80-85% of all the at-large invitations leaving about 15% (3-5 total invitations) to spread among roughly 200 or so mid-major teams and the majors do NOT have that kind of monopoly on "good teams".
Starting no later that February every year the conversation on these boards always turns to "is the MAC a two bid conference this year?"----and each year a significant number of people actually seem to believe is going to happen "this year" even though year after year after year it does NOT happen.
Each year I try to explain that the selection committee applies a secret, unspoken "Catch-22" sort of rule to the mid-majors. Namely (with apologies to Joseph Heller):
Only mid-majors who win their conference tournament qualify for an at-large bid. But of course those who win their conference tournament are automatic qualifiers
and don't need to be considered for an at-large but the rule is nevertheless consistent with the committee's objective. Namely to ensure that there are a massively disproportionately large number of major BB conference teams monopolizing those lucrative NCAA tourney slots that currently are worth about $1.5 million per each team per each game played, paid out over 6 years.
As with college football, men's collegiate basketball is no longer about creating a level field for intercollegiate sports competition, rather it is all about greed and creating entertainment extravaganzas that generate those big TV ratings that in turn generate all those big TV $$$$ that profit the power conferences and fuel the inequities that currently exist.
