(08-18-2021 05:22 AM)OscarWildeCat Wrote: Yup.
Lipscomb demonstrated how good they were that year by their stellar performance in the NIT.
I have no idea what Lipscomb did in the NIT, so I don't know if this is serious or sarcastic.
But either way, what someone does in a post-season tournament has zero correlation to the debate of whether they deserved inclusion or what their seed was.
Sure, someone like Loyola, George Mason, or VCU making a deep NCAA run proves they can hang with NCAA teams and therefore deserved a bid when THAT'S the knock on them.
But plenty of teams who DIDN'T deserve a bid but got one anyway and made a deep run on the "house money" principle. Those are usually BCS teams ranked in preseason who had a terrible regular season but still got in anyway (the early 2000s UNC team that was 16-14 on Selection Sunday and made the Final Four, or the last Syracuse Final Four team immediately come to mind).
But sucking in the NIT doesn't mean you didn't belong in the NCAA Tournament. And winning the NIT doesn't mean you belonged in the NCAA Tournament. For the most part all the teams of the top 100 are "Good enough" to actually MAKE an NCAA Tournament, it's a matter of if they PERFORMED well enough against their schedule to get in or not.
Lipscomb deserved a bid that year. I can't tell you who should have been left out, but I guarantee you I could easily find 4 P5 schools who were mediocre, had a dozen chances to beat good teams, failed to do so more than 3-4 times and didn't deserve a bid.