Column: CMU men's basketball gets no love from NCAA
Junior guard Chris Fowler drives to the hoop during the CMU men's basketball team's loss to Buffalo in the Mid-American Conference Championship Game March 14 at Quicken Loans Arena. (Photo by Monica Bradburn | Staff Photographer)
If you ask most people, they would say the Mid-American Conference deserves two bids in the NCAA Tournament.
The NCAA Tournament Selection Committee, however will only give the MAC one.
The University at Buffalo obtained that bid with a MAC Tournament Championship victory over Central Michigan University. The Bulls seized the MAC automatic bid over a CMU team that defeated them twice in the regular season.
Now the Chippewas are scratching their heads, wondering why the Selection Committee disagrees with the majority of America.
The MAC had eight teams with 20 or more wins. The Big Ten Conference and Atlantic Coastal Conference each have seven teams. Those two conferences combine for 13 of the teams in the 64-team field.
CMU only lost one game at home, won the MAC West, and notched the No. 1 seed in the MAC Tournament in Cleveland.
These factors should have given CMU a chance to plead their case for a tournament spot.
The Committee didn’t care. If CMU was going to punch their ticket to the “Big Dance,” they would have to beat Buffalo for a third time.
The entire conference is wondering why they continue to get no love from the NCAA.
Simply, the Chippewas and the rest of the MAC were excluded for three simple reasons:
Numbers, Power Five conferences, and strength of schedule.
There are 32 conferences in NCAA Division 1 Basketball. There are 64 spots in the NCAA Tournament. Each conference champion gets an automatic spot in the tournament.
There would be no discussion if CMU just defeated Buffalo again. They didn’t, and so the Bulls are one of the 32.
The committee favors the Power Five conferences – the Big Ten, ACC, Big 12 Conference, Pac 12 Conference, and Southeastern Conference – due to their tougher strength of schedule. Excluding conference champions, those five conferences already have sent 24 additional teams to the tournament.
There are now 56 teams.
That just leaves eight spots up for grabs. There are now at 61. The Atlantic-10 Conference, Mountain West Conference, American Conference, Missouri Valley Conference, and the West Coast Conference combine for seven additional bids. That totals to 68 teams. If you subtract four teams because of the First Four, you have your field of 64.
You can argue that the MAC is better than those conferences. CMU was not better than those conference teams when it comes to strength of schedule and Rating Percentage Index (RPI).
Their strength of schedule, in non-conference Division 1 games, was ranked 348th in the nation, according to CBSSports.com.
But until CMU wins with a better strength of schedule and the MAC proves to be a consistently dominant and competitive league, the Committee will continue to see the MAC as a “one bid” conference.
