One thing the committee got right: Excluding South Carolina
Play Tourney Pick’em | Fill out your bracket | Print it | Celebrity Challenge
South Carolina pulled off a seemingly impossible feat for a power-conference team.
The Gamecocks’ schedule was so tissue-soft that they played only two games all season against RPI top 50 opponents. They won at Texas A&M on Feb. 6 and they lost at home against Kentucky a week later.
Excluding South Carolina from the NCAA tournament was the wisest move the selection committee made in a bracket that is otherwise riddled with mistakes. It sends a message to coaches that they can’t assemble the nation’s 271st strongest non-conference schedule and expect to make the NCAA tournament.
Reinforcing that message is important to college basketball’s long-term health. If there’s no incentive to schedule marquee non-conference games, coaches will replace them with lightweights, viewers won’t have any reason to watch and the sport will suffer.
South Carolina is hardly the first borderline team to suffer for its non-conference schedule. Others who can sympathize: 2014 SMU, 2012 Ole Miss and 2010 Virginia Tech, as can a handful of other teams from the past decade.
Why would South Carolina (24-8, 11-7) assemble such a dismal schedule when it’s well known that the committee has a history of punishing slates like that?
Some of that is a product of Frank Martin wanting to build confidence in a team that hasn’t been to the NCAA tournament in 12 years. Some of that is a product of traditionally solid squads like Memphis and St. John’s enduring bad seasons. And some of that is a product underachieving LSU, Vanderbilt and Florida leaving the struggling SEC with only two high-quality teams.
In other words, don’t lay all the blame on Martin for not scheduling well enough to get South Carolina into the NCAA tournament. But don’t criticize the committee for leaving the Gamecocks out either.
On a day when the committee made numerous mistakes, excluding South Carolina isn’t one of them.
More on NCAA tournament
– – – – – – –
Jeff Eisenberg is the editor of The Dagger on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
