Which is why is MTSU from the Sun Belt got in over a C-USA team.

(03-01-2013 12:24 PM)FlashFan Wrote:  Change the names and it seems we have this conversation every year in early March.

Yes, because a team with two losses at the MAC level would need to have a much stronger out of conference resume of wins than MAC teams achieve in order to get an at-large bid, so among MAC teams, either one or none will be on the bubble for an at-large NCAA bid.

The NCAA bubble teams can normally count their top-50 wins, to be weighed against their strength of schedule and how bad their losses are. In the MAC, there's often none and rarely more than one who has top-50 wins to count.

Had Akron won out through to the Championship Game, and not lost their star to the War on Drugs, then not only would they have had a guaranteed NIT bid, they would have been on the NCAA bubble in the event of a close loss in the final against an OU playing well (noting that we are deep into double hypotheticals here). But by the last few weeks of the season, neither OU nor anyone else in the MAC was in that frame.