Bruce Weber was fired at Illinois on Friday, and it was emotional and a bit uncomfortable to watch him talk for 13 minutes, often having to stop to hold back tears. But Weber lost his job for a simple reason. His team is not going to make the NCAA tournament this year.
And if I were an athletic director at a school that won’t be part of March Madness next week, I’d think long and hard about firing my coach, too. That may be overstating it, but only by a bit. It has never been easier to make the NCAA tournament than it is this year. If you can’t make this field, it’s fair to ask: When are you going to make it?
Yeah, I’m talking about you, Northwestern. I’m talking about you, Mississippi State. I’m looking right at you, Washington and Oregon. All of those teams are likely to be left out when the brackets are revealed Sunday. And when that happens, CBS will show reaction shots of the snubbed, and a room full of depressed faces will beg the nation to feel sorry for them.
But take no pity on the NIT-bound. Not this year. Anybody who doesn’t make this NCAA tournament has earned their fate.
"Well, I think again, it’s over (32) games what you judge us on," Mississippi State coach Rick Stansbury said after his team lost to a 15-16 Georgia team Thursday night in the first round of the SEC tournament.
Don’t worry, Rick. You’ll be judged over all 32 games. You just probably won’t like the answer.
More than any year in recent memory, conference championship week has been carnage on the so-called bubble. So underwhelming is this group of teams competing for the final eighth to 10 spots in the field, it has felt at times like anybody who simply didn't lose to a bad team would be helping their case. The problem is, nearly all of these teams have lost, often in ridiculous fashion.
Oregon probably needed just one win in the Pac-12 tournament but lost to Colorado in the quarterfinals. Washington knew it was on the bubble despite winning the Pac-12 regular season. How did the Huskies respond to the pressure? They got bounced by No. 8 seed Oregon State.
Northwestern, despite a 1-10 record against teams in the RPI top 50, would’ve been a likely at-large team if it had beaten ninth-place Minnesota in the Big Ten tournament. Instead, the Wildcats flat-out gagged away the game in overtime and will fall short of the school’s first-ever NCAA bid. St. Joseph’s, Seton Hall, Mississippi State? Choke, choke, choke.
"These players have never heard NCAA, they have never heard ‘bubble,’ " St. Joseph’s coach Phil Martelli said after Friday's loss to St. Bonaventure in the Atlantic 10 tournament. "Our intention was to win today and then let everything else take care of itself. This hurts. It hurts. But ... the implication for the NCAA tournament, that had nothing to do with this game for us."
Uh-huh. Whether they admit it, pressure affects everybody in sports. And there’s really nothing more pressurized in college basketball than teams living and dying on the bubble.
Getting into the NCAA tournament is everything in this sport; it’s the ultimate pass-fail on a season. And with the proliferation of bracketologists and bloggers breaking down who's in and who's out on an hourly basis, it's impossible for players to shut out the noise. Some teams simply aren’t able to handle the stress of knowing they have to win to get in.
And it hasn't just been the major conferences. Iona had a great chance at an at-large bid if it could make the finals of the Metro Atlantic tournament, but it lost in the semifinals to Fairfield, a team it had beaten 10 days before.
Middle Tennessee had a wide-open path to an at-large bid, but it lost its final two games to Western Kentucky and Arkansas State, teams with a combined record of 28-38. Oral Roberts dominated the Summit League and racked up 27 wins. But a stunning first-round conference-tournament loss to Western Illinois looked a lot like a gag job.
Bubble teams playing themselves out of bids is nothing new. But this many? By Friday, some folks were trying to figure out if 21-12 Marshall — Marshall, for goodness sakes — had played its way onto the bubble by beating Southern Miss in the C-USA semifinals.
It’s going to leave us on Sunday with arguably the weakest NCAA tournament field of all time. And the NCAA actually was talking about expanding the field to 96 a couple years ago? Pffft.
The good news, though, is the annual complaining about who gets in and who gets left out will fall on deaf ears this year. The NCAA selection committee has interesting choices. Does it reward great seasons by mid-major teams such as Middle Tennessee and Iona? Does it go with teams that were hot down the stretch, such as Tennessee? Does it put in a largely unaccomplished team like Washington based on the fact they won the Pac-12 regular season title? Do they use the ever-evasive eye test?
More than ever, there’s really no right or wrong answers this year, thus no right to whine. If you couldn’t make it in this year, it’s nobody’s fault but your own. The NCAA tournament always is great no matter who plays in it. But if your school doesn’t make it, you have plenty of right to be upset — because all you had to be this season was mediocre. Getting into the Big Dance has never been easier.
