the realist’s take – we’re just not that good

The day before Black Sunday, I flew down to Tampa to spend some time with papa Syracusan during my week off. I realized there was an ill wind in the air when I got off the plane and saw a giant digital events billboard in Tampa airport exclaiming Welcome ACC Tournament 2007! (It also read Welcome Scientologists, Ron’s Birthday 2007! But that’s another story). Unbeknownst to me, I had dropped right into the midst of ACC mania, despite traveling to a city where no ACC team resides. How exactly Tampa turned into enemy territory I do not know; the only DI team in the area is the Big East’s USF. It’s typical ACC arrogance I suppose, to hold their tournament in our zone of influence.

The ACC’s posters and paraphernalia were all over town, and coverage in the local newspapers and TV was heavy, but I was able to drown it all out lying in the sun on the beach. What I wasn’t able to drown out was a growing sense of unease about the approaching NCAA draw. I haven’t chimed in about last weekend’s debacle yet, though I’ve enjoyed everyone else’s tortured rantings, both on this forum and on other blog sites. Everyone has made a lot of good points, and it’s almost served to convince me that we were in fact robbed. Almost.

In the final two weeks or so of the season, I checked the RPI every single day. What I knew then, and everyone has realized by now, is that despite our hot end to the season, we weren’t seeing results on those charts. I got a lump in my throat after every victory, when inevitably we’d only tick up one or two points, when we really needed to jump ten at a time to get into the “safe” zone. A few people mentioned this down the stretch, including the official blog over at the Post-Standard, but for the most part the RPI faded from the conversation after the Georgetown game. But not for me.

I kept checking and checking, hoping that some of our former opponents would do us a favor by winning some games, and switch up the math in our favor. I cheered on OK St as they made a little run in the Big XII Tourney, and toasted Holy Cross when they won theirs. But the extent of the compiled stats over the course of the whole season ran too deep. Our ranking never budged from the 49 mark. I’ve been following the NCAA selection process avidly for 15 or so years, and in all that time, no team with an RPI that awful has had a right to call itself a lock.

Thus, I was pleasantly surprised when everyone else on earth considered us a lock. Not only the whole of the national media, but the guru himself, Joe Lunardi. Lunardi has been no friend to Syracuse over the years (though I’m sure many schools would say that about him), and he’s about as conservative a prognosticator as we have in the sports world. He’s a cold, hard, calculator with no room for subjectivity and no sympathy for “conventional wisdom”. So when even Lunardi took us off the bubble, I forced myself to swallow and figured there must be something different about this year. There must be a sense in the zeitgeist that the RPI is a little frazzled this season and shouldn’t be looked to as a guide as it has in the past. Too bad no one told the committee.

In reality, the RPI is there for a reason. It gets at certain truths that you can’t otherwise see. Yes, it’s flawed, and it overvalues SOS and your opponents SOS, but there’s meaning behind those numbers and the committee respects those meanings. They take other things into account, but they value the RPI as guide, and it’s a little bizarre to me that the entire Syracuse world collectively stuck it’s head in the sand down the stretch this season. Our godawful RPI was like the 800 pound gorilla in the middle of the room that everyone chose to ignore.

To be clear, I didn’t have the balls to say any of this last week. I was caught up in the tidal wave of positive public opinion about our status. Also, there was no compelling evidence that we were out, per se. I never thought that we had a bad case for the NCAAs, specifically. I just thought that we had some serious irrational exuberance going on, and that in reality we were firmly on the bubble. An RPI around 50 can certainly get you in, as can an RPI much worse than that, but in my experience if you’re not in the top 40, you have no business being confident about your fate. Instead we were collectively complacent, which made it hurt a lot more when the ax fell.

My growing sense of dread intensified last weekend for reasons a little harder to quantify. As scores from other conference tournaments flashed by, the results felt troublesome. I never did the math, but after so many years tracking this stuff, you start to get a feel for the shifting fortunes of teams on a national scale. Too many bubble teams were doing well. Too many mid-majors were producing screwy results in their tournaments. Hmmm…Nevada didn’t win the WAC, that can’t be good. Wait, Arkansas is in the SEC title game?? It’s not something you can quantify in your head, it’s more like a veteran card player whose subconscious counts the cards for him. Hmmm…it probably would have been better if Southern Illinois had won the MVC instead of Creighton. It’s too hard to keep track of the 34 at large births in your head as the wins and losses ebb and flow, but sometimes experience screams out warnings in the back of your head, even if you can’t figure out the math yourself.

But like I said, I never had the balls to say any of this ahead of time on Cuse Country or anywhere else (not that my dad would have been all that interested in hearing it while we were sitting on a sailboat in Boca Ciega Bay). The only guy I read down the stretch who had the situation right was MightyRay over at OrangeHoops, who repeatedly stressed that we needed to go 6-0 in our last six to get in the Tournament (which we did not do). Many thought he was being overly conservative, but he had it right on target. Alas, he didn’t stick to his guns, and after the 5-1 finish and the thrilling Georgetown game, he got caught in the hype like the rest of us. He posited that the Villanova loss was acceptable as long we didn’t lose to UConn in the first round of the BE Tourney. It made sense at the time, but what that fails to account for is that beating a terrible UConn team doesn’t make up for missing the resume building opportunity of beating a Villanova. The UConn win was as useless as the South Florida or St John’s wins in our last 10. Those games might as well not exist as far as helping our cause.

Immediately after the Georgetown game we were a lock for the Tournament, but the problem is we spent the next week and a half treading water. We neither improved nor damaged our resume, but going 1-2 after the Hoyas game impressed no one. More importantly, too many other teams did what they needed to do to leapfrog us during that stretch, and we didn’t take care of business defending the ground we had gained. You have to be prepared for the at-large bids to get a little wacky during the conference tournaments, but instead we let down our guard. Doug Gottlieb is a massive douchebag for proclaiming us a “lock” one day, and then bragging like a cocksucker after we were left out that we “never had a chance”, but his defense for that flip flop made sense: at one point we were definitely in. Then the landscape changed around us and we were back out again. Shit happens.

[For an amazing mano e mano throwdown between our two favorite sparring partners, scroll down this page on ESPN.com to the Podcast link. It’s a 15 minute interview on ESPN radio between Doug Gottlieb and Jim Boeheim. Jimmy agreed to go on his show right after Black Sunday, and they have a pretty good debate. Lets just say that the tension is palpable on the air.]

At the end of the day, I don’t buy any of the conspiracy theories and I don’t buy that we’re so clearly better than the other bubble teams that got in ahead of us. I think we have an equal or minutely superior argument to Illinois and Arkansas (interestingly, Jimmy has no beef with the Stanford pick), but not to such a degree that it’s a travesty of justice. The only complaint that I think holds water is the concern about the Big East not having representation on the Committee this year. Human nature dictates a small degree of bias, no matter who you are, and that right there is probably all the explanation you need as to who got in. In my eyes, there were about 7 roughly equal teams shooting for the last 4 spots, and through a combination of bad luck and not having an advocate in the room, we were one of the 3 who got screwed. For the record, my money says Drexel was next in line though, not us.

I’ll wrap up this feature length exposition with one last bit of subjective reasoning: if you want to know why SU isn’t in the dance, just watch us play. We’re really not a great team. The way we looked for much of the South Alabama game was fairly representative of the way we look all the time. It’s not pretty, it’s not impressive, and it doesn’t give you much room to demand inclusion in any exclusive clubs. We lost to too many bad teams, we failed to beat good teams in our limited chances, we had but one road victory over a quality opponent, and our record against the top 50 speaks for itself. It sucks that we’re not dancing, but it’s absolutely a tossup as to whether we deserved to be there.