Two minutes into the second half of the Atlantic 10 championship game Sunday in Brooklyn, streamers and confetti began tumbling from the Barclays Center rafters onto the court.
The Mountain West knows the feeling. It spent Saturday night and Sunday morning celebrating a record six teams expected to make the NCAA Tournament.
Then the bracket and seeds were released.
San Diego State, which finished fifth in the conference and is ranked No. 24 in the latest Associated Press poll released Monday, is a No. 5 seed.
Utah State, which won the regular-season title and is ranked 20th, is an 8 seed.
Nevada, Boise State and Colorado State are all 10th seeds, and the latter two were sent to Dayton for the ignominy of play-in games.
New Mexico, which won four games in four days to claim the Mountain West Tournament title and is ranked 22nd in the NCAA’s NET metric, is an 11.
It was the best Selection Sunday in conference history. It also might have been the worst, at least compared to expectations.
According to The Bracket Matrix, a website that tracks hundreds of pro and amateur bracketologists in the weeks leading to Selection Sunday, only five teams in the final field of 68 received seeds more than 1.5 spots below their average projections. All five are from the Mountain West.
Boise State gathered in a meeting room with a panoramic view of snowcapped mountains to watch Sunday’s Selection Show on CBS. When the Broncos appeared as a 10 seed with a slash next to Colorado, indicating the play-in game Wednesday, there were gasps followed by eerie silence. Coach Leon Rice’s jaw dropped. The university president, seated next to him in a blue dress, covered her face with her hands.
By Monday morning, they were on a plane to Dayton.
“I think that’s kind of what we’ve had all year long,” Rice told media. “It feels like the disrespect has been consistent. We got second in a league that’s a six-bid league. You get that good of a league and you get second and that low of a seed? It’s a head-scratcher.”
“One of the worst screw jobs I’ve seen, man,” said Gonzaga coach Mark Few, Rice’s former boss.
A few hundred miles away, Colorado State coach Niko Medved was processing his Rams being the last team to make the field — and also headed to a First Four game Tuesday against Virginia — despite being ranked as high as No. 13 in the AP poll this season.
“I’m not the expert, but I think if you talked to the hundreds of people who do the bracketology, they really had all the Mountain West teams seeded higher,” Medved said. “But you know what? That’s fine. They always disrespect our league. Now it’s time to go out and try and do something about it.”
That involves actually winning in the NCAA Tournament. Other than SDSU’s run to the championship game last year, the Mountain West is 0-11 over the past four tournaments.
That also might involve hearing the message the selection committee is sending and doing something about it.
“We spent a lot of time talking about every team, including all the teams in the Mountain West,” Bubba Cunningham, North Carolina’s athletic director who will be chair of the selection committee next season, told CBS Sports Network on Sunday. “And what we were discussing as a group is we didn’t have that many data points outside of their conference. A lot of their wins against really high-ranking teams or high-seeded teams or high teams in the NET all seem to be in their league.
“So it made it more challenging for us because we didn’t have a lot of play across the country.”
The six Mountain West teams in the field amassed 31 Quad 1 wins in the NET metric, which divides opponents into four levels based on statistics and results. Twenty-four came against each other. Of the seven from the nonconference, only two were against teams outside the Pacific or Mountain time zones — Colorado State against Creighton and Nevada against TCU in Honolulu (after Horned Frogs coach Jamie Dixon was ejected in the first half).
None came against teams from the Eastern time zone.
It becomes a statistical echo chamber, then, beating each other in a down year for West Coast basketball with just one team — Arizona — consistently ranked in the top 20. With little basis of comparison east of the Mississippi, the selection committee likely defaulted to the conference’s dismal record in the NCAA Tournament.
Wrote ESPN bracketologist Joe Lunardi in a Selection Sunday post-mortem: “The Mountain West was appropriately downgraded (in of seeding) for the vast (number) of its Quadrant 1 wins coming in conference play. There is clearly an understanding that individual NET numbers were a bit inflated in an otherwise excellent conference.”
Expanding your reach in the nonconference requires scheduling flexibility, and the Mountain West will have less of it next season. Two weeks ago, it announced plans to move from an 18- to 20-game conference schedule next season, where you play everyone else home and away.
The vote among athletic directors was 9-1 with one abstention. The lone no vote came from SDSU.
“We have been steadfast in our opposition,” Aztecs Athletic Director John David Wicker said.
Coach Brian Dutcher, and before him Steve Fisher, has long been a proponent of a shorter conference schedule to allow more nonconference opportunities that build an at-large NCAA resume. The Aztecs regularly skipped two lower-tier teams in the unbalanced, 18-game schedule — this year it was a Quad 3 and Quad 4 game — and added heft on the front end in November and December.
This season, they played road games in some of the most hostile environments in college basketball — at BYU, at Grand Canyon, at Gonzaga and at UC San Diego in what was the largest, loudest crowd in school history. They also played neutral-court events against Saint Mary’s, Washington and Cal, and Stanford at home.
One metric ranked it the most difficult nonconference schedule among the nation’s top 50 teams.
The committee noticed and rewarded the Aztecs, ignoring their fifth-place finish in the Mountain West and blessing them with a No. 5 seed in a favorable West Coast venue (Spokane, Wash.) — even though geographic protection is usually reserved for the top four seed lines.
There’s also an argument that the rest of the Mountain West rode those coattails to a record number of NCAA Tournament bids. The committee chair itted New Mexico wouldn’t have made the field had it not beaten SDSU in the conference tournament final Saturday and claimed an automatic bid. Boise State, the third from last team in, likely would have been out as well if Lamont Butler hadn’t missed a free throw with 15 seconds left in regulation two Fridays ago, allowing the Broncos to force overtime and steal a marquee win.
Colorado State was the last team in. Would the Rams have made it without their Jan. 30 win against SDSU?
Same with Nevada, also a 10 seed.
They all gilded their résumés on the back of wins against an SDSU team which scheduled aggressively in November and December, something that won’t be as easy, or perhaps possible, with a 20-game conference schedule.’
Mountain West Commissioner Gloria Nevarez celebrated the record haul of bids Sunday, one more than the ACC, two more than the Pac-12 and three more than the Big East — all leagues rated higher.
She also its she would have “liked to have seen the committee reward that strength with higher seeding” and they’ll perform “a deep dive into the data and debrief coaches and athletic directors after the Final Four.”
In the meantime, they have six chances to win games, worth an extra $2 million to the conference on top of $2 million each for getting into the tournament. Six chances to change its perception to the 12 people who matter most, the men and women who sit on the selection committee that Cunningham will chair next year.
“It is a historic night for the Mountain West Conference: six teams in the NCAA Tournament,” CBS Sports analyst Jon Rothstein said on air Sunday night. “But we also have four of those teams with double-digit seeds. Two of them will be in the First Four in Dayton.
“A wise man once said: ‘It’s nothing personal, it’s just business.’ This is personal for the Mountain West. Do not celebrate getting six teams in. Do something in the NCAA Tournament.”
