Hmmm....
>>The committee wound up omitting our last three in (UConn, Old Dominion and Gonzaga) in favor of our first three out (A&M, St. John’s and Maryland). And we don’t have any huge objection to that — as we said, all six of them are worthy. But we thought Connecticut was a fairly easy call to get in based on its 14-10 record in the No. 4 RPI conference, its No. 38 RPI as a Northern team and its respectable 17-18 record against the top 50 (which blows away Maryland’s 10-11 mark, for instance). And Old Dominion finished in second place in the No. 6 Conference USA, which managed to get just two bids, while the seventh-ranked Big Ten got five. But the strength of the AAC did not help UConn with the committee, according to committee chairman Scott Sidwell, the athletics director at San Francisco. “Based upon the criteria that we have in front of us, what RPI a conference is is not part of our established criteria,” he said. “We try to look at their individual resumes and stack them up against other teams. As we went through the process, we just didn’t think they had a strong enough resume based upon some others we considered.” When I pressed Sidwell about specific teams like Gonzaga and UConn, I did not receive any satisfying explanations for their omissions — just generalities like you see above. That was disappointing.<<
>>I think I’ve said this before on previous podcasts, but the mid-major conferences (at least the perceived mid-major conferences) seldom get the benefit of the doubt in committee proceedings. That much was evident again on Monday as the American Conference, ranked No. 4 in conference RPI, got the three obvious teams (Houston, UCF and USF) in the field, but did not get Connecticut into the field. The Huskies, which had an RPI of 38 and finished just one game out of first place in the regular season, should’ve made the field<<