I said back in December that the conferences (outside of UConn & Marquette) lack of OOC wins was concerning and this could end up a 4 bid league. Yesterday was even worse than I thought it could be.
With that said, I think Providence did enough in conference to earn a bid (they beat Marquette and 2X Creighton) and St. John’s had good metrics even though they really only had 1 signature win… especially compared to Virginia or the MWC teams whose best win on the season (outside of their league) was over Creighton (which PC did 2X and St. John’s did as well).
Seton Hall has 2 of the best wins in the country with wins over UConn and Marquette.
But we pooped the bed, as a league, in the non conference slate this year. Outside of the BIG / 12 challenges the middle / bottom tier teams in the league don’t really schedule any good games and participate in tier 2 or 3 MTEs.
IMO, this needs to be addressed by the commissioner (privately is okay) to ensure we don’t get screwed like this going forward. Plus teach these teams how to game the metrics like the Big 12 and SEC (Auburn had 1 win against a top 85 KenPom team away from home before this past weekend but was consistently a Top 10 team in the metrics).
Val is a useless commissioner though whose only good move since we’ve rejoined the league was extending the MSG contract, so I doubt she does anything about it.
I’m hoping a strong OOC showing next year has this league back to getting 5 or 6 bids. If not, it could be a signal from the NCAA of how they view the Big East as a “power” conference…