I am going to cry if these teams don't make the men's NCAA Tournament
These teams could be the heroes of March Madness. We're rooting for them to make it. And prepared to take action (crying) if they do not.
March Madness is about falling in love with teams you’ve never heard of. The men’s NCAA Tournament selection committee has decided their job is to include as few of those teams as possible.
In 2018, I wrote about how the selection committee used to extend at-large bids to mid-major programs like George Mason, Wichita State, and UC-Santa Barbara, but gradually transitioned to only inviting teams from the biggest leagues. That trend has only gotten worse.
As the power conferences add more and more members and make their conference schedules longer, it becomes harder for all the other teams to put together quality resumes, and easier for the selection committee and bracketologists to justify ignoring all the basketball being played outside those leagues.
A look at the Bracket Matrix shows that of the 37 teams projected by bracketologists to receive at-large bids to the men’s NCAA Tournament right now, 34 are from the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, and SEC. That leaves just three bids for everybody else. If everything breaks right during conference tournaments, that might rise to four or even five bids for the little guys, which is still much fewer than we got 15 or 20 years ago. And “little guys” is a stretch—we’re talking about programs like Gonzaga and Memphis. It’s basically impossible for a school from a legitimately small league to get selected by the committee, even if they’re near-perfect in conference play.
We’re getting more NCAA Tournament upsets and bigger NCAA Tournament upsets than ever before, and somehow the people in charge have decided to pay even less attention to the types of teams capable of pulling off those upsets.
This calls for the most effective direct action I am capable of: Crying.
This is the introduction of a new feature I plan on publishing every March, called I am going to cry if these teams don't make the NCAA Tournament.
The good news is that these teams still have a chance to win their conference tournaments. They’re all favorites, and we’ll be rooting for them. But they’re held to a standard of perfection that major conference opponents simply aren’t, and as a result, they never get a chance to prove whether they’re better than the 8th-best team in the Big Ten. It’s another instance of structural advantages being given to those who do not need them, at the expense of a deserving underclass. I am prepared to cry in protest.
Some crying notes:
I have no affiliation with any of these schools. To the best of my knowledge, I do not know anybody who roots for these teams. My crying is not about my personal rooting interests, but an objective injustice.
I probably can’t work up the legit emotion to tear up about the NCAA Tournament selection process. I’m just not a big crying guy. I’ll probably have to watch a Pixar movie (probably Coco) or think about an old dog sitting in a sunbeam, unsure why she doesn’t have the energy or desire to run like she used to.
I don’t have to do a separate cry for each team. Just one cry counts.
I will not be providing evidence of me crying. You just have to believe me.
Hopefully, these teams win their conference tournaments and prevent me from having to cry. But also, the NCAA Selection Committee should think long and hard about whether they want me to cry.
Here are this year’s three teams:
UC-San Diego
Why do they deserve a bid?
They’re 26-4 and blowing opponents out, with an average margin of victory of 18.9 points, behind only Duke. They’re ranked 36th in Ken Pomeroy’s ratings, an absurdly high number for a program from a mid-major league. The last time the Big West produced a team close to this good was in 2012, when Long Beach State ranked 36th.
The short list of mid-major programs rated this high in recent years includes 2018 Loyola-Chicago (33rd) and 2022 Florida Atlantic (23rd), and both those teams made the freakin’ Final Four while college basketball nerds leapt and screamed YOU SHOULD HAVE LOOKED AT THE KENPOM RATINGS after each “upset.”
And they play funky, aggressive basketball, leading the nation in steals and sixth in 3-pointers. It’s easy to imagine them giving a better team fits—and it’s easy to imagine them actually being the better team, no matter what the seed next to their name says.
Why should we care?
This would be UCSD’s first trip to the NCAA Tournament, and the Tritons have stayed true to themselves as they transitioned up from Division II to Division I. Some schools switch coaches when they move up. UCSD stuck with Eric Olen, who is 44 and has been coaching for the Tritons for 21 years, basically half of his live. He started as an assistant in 2004, got promoted to head coach in 2013, quickly turned the team into a consistent winner and stuck the landing on their transition. Olen is almost certainly getting hired away by somebody with deeper pockets this coaching cycle, and it’d be nice for his lifetime with the Tritons to end on a high.
What other very critical facts are influencing your decision?
UCSD is a true standout in the mascot game—the only mascot in Division I named after a single mythological god, and surely the only one named after a Disney character: They are the Tritons, named after King Triton, son of Poseidon, ruler of the depths of the sea, best known to our generations as Ariel’s human-hating dad in The Little Mermaid. This video indicates the UCSD version of King Triton apparently shops at Costco and has legitimately impressive handles.
In “Part of Your World,” Ariel notes that despite her countless array of gadgets, gizmos, whosits, whatsits, and exactly 20 thingamabobs, legs are required to go dancing. Good news for UCSD—unlike his Disney counterpart, their King Triton does, in fact, have legs, so he’s ready for his first Big Dance.
How much danger are they in?
The good news is the Big West has one of those gauntlet-style brackets which gives its top two seeds a double-bye to the semifinals. The Tritons will only need to win two games to win the conference and get that auto-bid. However, that format also helps out second-seed UC-Irvine, and the Anteaters are also pretty good—they went 25-5, are ranked 67th on Kenpom, and beat UCSD in San Diego in January.
I find it hard to believe the committee would extend an at-large bid to UCSD. The Big West hasn’t received two bids since 2005, and those two teams were Utah State and Pacific, both of which have since left the conference. The Tritons haven’t been ranked in the AP Poll this season (although they are currently receiving a handful of votes.) They’re 34th in the NET ratings, below the Indiana State team the committee snubbed last year, and they were unable to schedule any schools from major conferences. If I were on the selection committee, I wouldn’t go on any cruises after snubbing the son of Poseidon.
Drake
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Why do they deserve a bid?
The Bulldogs are tied for the best record in college basketball, 27-3. They’re 3-0 against the committee’s precious power conferences, including a win over Vanderbilt, a likely tournament participant from the all-powerful SEC.
I understand the importance of strength of schedule and advanced analytic metrics… but, look, if a team is winning 90 percent of their games, they should be in.
There are 68 spots in the field. We can reserve one of those 68 for all the teams that made it to March with losses you can count on one hand. I don’t care if they played in the POOP-10 Conference or the Big Thirteen or the Little Ten or the Mid-Sized 14 Conference… and the Missouri Valley is not the POOP-10 conference! It’s a consistently solid league that produces NCAA Tournament winners year after year!
Why should we care?
This isn’t a program transitioning up from Division II, like UCSD. They are, however, a Division II basketball team, more or less.
Drake got decimated after head coach Darian DeVries left for West Virginia, as the Bulldogs lost 94.9 percent of their scoring from the team that made last year’s NCAA Tournament. They made a fascinating hire to replace DeVries: Ben McCollum, a 4-time Division II national champion at Northwest Missouri State, including back-to-back-to-back championships from 2019 to 2022. (And it could’ve been four in a row—the Bearcats were 31-1 when the 2020 tournament was canceled, and the one defeat was a 6-point loss to literally the Duke University Blue Devils at Cameron Indoor Stadium.)
McCollum brought his squad up with him. Four of their Drake’s starters, including likely conference player of the year Bennett Stirtz, came with McCollum. (Poor Northwest Missouri went 6-22 this year. I have to assume Bearcats fans are just rooting for Drake instead.)
And it’s working! This team is a reminder that often, we prejudge players based on the uniforms they’re wearing. These were Division I ballers wearing Division II clothes. Now they’re a tournament-level team wearing mid-major clothes. Hopefully the committee looks at their accomplishments and not their name.
What other very critical facts are influencing your decision?
These kids could use a win after a year of having to play for a school named after the biggest Rap Beef Loser of all time. You know they’re tired of hearing Not Like Us in layup lines every road game while opposing student sections scream HEY DRAKE, I HEAR YOU LIKE ‘EM YOUNG. Let’s hope they win Arch Madness and avoid becoming Certified Bubble Boys.
How much danger are they in?
If they lose in St. Louis, Drake’s in-or-out status will be the biggest story of the selection cycle. The problem is Arch Madness is really hard to win, as the MVC is a consistently deep league. The 1-seed has won this league just twice in the last decade—Loyola-Chicago in 2018, and Loyola-Chicago in 2021. Conference tourney chaos is cute when the committee regularly gives multiple bids to a league, but now it’s routinely keeping solid squads out of the NNCAAs. Kenpom gives the Bulldogs a 40 percent chance of winning the MVC.
And Drake seems to be teetering on the wrong edge of the bubble. The Bracket Matrix has them as the team on the brink, below every single at-large bid, but ahead of every other one-bid champion. Luckily, those Northwest Missouri guys have a really, really good history in single-elimination tournaments.
High Point
Why do they deserve a bid?
The Panthers are 26-5. They’re currently on an 11-game win streak, and their last four wins have all been by at least 20 points. Meanwhile, their most recent loss, all the way back in January, was by two points on a buzzer-beater on the road. They were only able to schedule one game against a team in the top 100 on Kenpom, North Texas… and beat them.
Why should we care?
High Point is a Never Made The Tourney Club member since 1999, and this is by far their best team. Their previous high Kenpom rating was 145th, nearly 60 spots worse. They’ve tried lots of stuff, like hiring High Point alum Tubby Smith, and nothing has worked… until now.
This year’s Never Made The Tourney Club primer lays out the now-or-never nature of this season well:
This feels like a make-it-or-break-it year for the Panthers, knowing most of the firepower on their senior-heavy squad will graduate after the season, and that someone might very well come calling for second year coach Alan Huss, who’s gone 27-5 in league games in that time. If and when that happens, it’s unlikely perennial powers Winthrop and Asheville will stay down for too long… Last year, they lost in the semifinals by a point in overtime to Longwood. Nearly the entire team came back, a year wiser, to avenge that loss and go dancing.
How much danger are they in?
GRAVE! Kenpom gives the Panthers a 49 percent chance at winning the Big South tournament. I think that’s selling them a bit short, but the stakes are huge. If teams like Drake are on the bubble, a team like High Point, with more losses in a lesser league, have no shot.
Please, please pull it off. Because if not… well, I think I’ve been pretty clear about what happens next. I’m gonna have to cry.
It would be awesome for these teams to make the tournament. I think it comes down to a few different views on which teams should be in the tournament:
1) Guess which at-large teams are the best 37, and include them all
2) Figure out which teams will get the most viewership and have at least a somewhat arguable case for being in the tournament, and include them
3) Ensure that every team which could conceivably be among the top ~20 teams are all there, and let things play out from there
The teams from smaller conferences *might* be less likely to make the final four than a .500-in-conference power conference team, and most of them probably have smaller fanbases, but I think we can say with very high confidence that Indiana, Ohio State, Arkansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma (all on the 11-seed line in the bracket matrix) are not among the top 10 teams in the country, since they have played against enough other good teams to prove that they consistently aren't that good. But even if UCSD is right in the same realm on KenPom, I would bet there is a lot more upside to their potential tournament performance than a random 18-12 power conference team. Sadly, I don't think the committee thinks that way.
Rodger as a ucsd alum this one strikes close to home for me. And one other important point not mentioned in the article is that This is our first year of postseason eligibility because of our 4(? I think it was 4) year postseason ban after moving from D2 to D1. This meant I never had a chance while I was at school to see the Tritons even in the big west. The ban never made any sense to me (why do incumbent teams need to avoid competition with teams recently out of D2 that’ll probably suck anyway) but with the ban over we’re all extremely hopeful for our first taste of postseason hoops.