Frankly, is the RedHawks’ resume all that good?
As the college basketball regular season hurtles toward the finish line and teams jockey for position in the NCAA Tournament—and, of course, the almighty The Crown, an Equally-Prestigious Competition which must be spelled as The Crown every single time with no exceptions—we approach the silly season that is March.
Yes, it’s time for the season that one college basketball analyst has tried to make his entire personality, the season in which you schedule
your vasectomy—cc to WhiteSpeedReceiver, give it a thought—the season in which, apparently, college basketball ADs and washed-up hacks are taking to ESPN shows and Twitter, denouncing some teams in favor of others.
This week, that stupidity extended to the #19 Miami-Ohio RedHawks, the undefeated giants of the MAC, sporting a 29-0 (16-0 MAC) record…to go with a rating of just 87 in Kenpom, 78 in Torvik, and 52 in NET. With their best win coming over…uh…Wright State?—and a recent escape of bottom-feeders Western Michigan seeing RedHawks head coach Travis Steele break the in-house DJ’s equipment during a halftime tirade—Miami’s place in the NCAA Tournament should they sustain a loss or two is, well, questionable.
It fell, of course, to obnoxious shouter Bruce Pearl to Speak His Truth and break that news on some college basketball show where people shout about things:
Perhaps understandably if just given his secondary role as a public booster for his school’s programs, the athletics director at Miami-Ohio, David Sayler, responded:
Now. This is all deeply, deeply stupid.
It’s stupid I have to hear from Bruce Pearl, a whiner who, tired of a system of college basketball in which he couldn’t cheat and/or turn in others for cheating, screwed off to TV to collect a paycheck while maneuvering to get his son installed as head coach of Auburn. It’s stupid I have to read the tweets of a man who ostensibly should be able to spell and express himself like an adult but who collects a paycheck many times larger than mine.
And it’s stupid that I—as a college sports blogger poorly compensated to write about exactly these sorts of things if they affect the Big Ten—feel compelled to weigh in on this “controversy.” (There’s bigger shit going on in the world.) That’s because apparently if the RedHawks lost one of their games between now and the semifinals or so of the MAC Tournament, there’s a real possibility they would be left out of the NCAA Tournament entirely.
So, we return to our article’s framing question:
Which Big Ten bubble teams should make the NCAA Tournament over Miami-Ohio?
None of them.
At worst, the RedHawks will be 29-3, and that’s assuming they lose their final three games to 16-13 (10-6) Toledo at home, 15-14 (9-7) Ohio on the road, and to a low, low seed in the first round of the MAC Tournament.
If the RedHawks lost all three of those games, perhaps the team to whom they lost in the MAC Tournament—a Western Michigan or Eastern Michigan—would be enough to make me reconsider this spicy take. After all, the RedHawks are 0-0 in Quad 1 games, 1-0 in Quad 2 games, 9-0 in Quad 3 games, and 16-0 in Quad 4 games. They ain’t played nobody, Pawwwwwl, and perhaps that reward should go to USC or Indiana or Ohio State.
Counterpoint: shut the fuck up and let college basketball be fun.
In the slow, inexorable march toward death and/or service in some overseas forever war—and those two are not mutually-exclusive, of course—could college sports retain at least a veneer of being fun and elevating teams who have done pretty damn historic things?
Sure, if all I have is an emotional appeal, perhaps you’re not going to be swayed. The truth is, I hardly have a statistical or rational appeal, because (1) I don’t care enough, (2) I’m just here so I don’t get fined/fired, and (3) what makes college athletics fun is that reason flies out the goddamn window and grown-ass men spend millions—in the case of my school’s new football stadium, billions with a B—of their hard-earned dollars on things that do not matter.
This is a fundamentally irrational sport and world, and the Miami RedHawks’ historic levels should have already earned them the opportunity to prove that on the highest stage. Teams like USC—now without Chad Baker-Mazara (injury/hissy fit)—Indiana (lost to Northwestern, disqualified), and Ohio State (morally reprenhensible, but a Good Win over Purdue) add nothing here beyond a big name. They are second-round exits waiting to happen, earning their conferences and administrators money that they do not need.
Miami has beaten weird and silly teams to get to this point, but they have beaten them. They should have the shot to win one more. In a sport and an atmosphere where little makes sense ever and certainly not anymore, that much should still be logical.
