Green Bay, SMU see bubbles burst
Green Bay coach Brian Wardle told his players all season: Control what you can control.
He would say, for example, not to put themselves in the situation where an official could decide a game’s outcome. And it helped as much as anything could help on a night like Sunday, when Green Bay was left out of the NCAA tournament field. The 24-6 Phoenix lost in the Horizon League semifinals March 8 to Milwaukee, which earned the conference’s automatic-bid.
Green Bay, along with Southern Methodist, headlines this year’s list of snubs.
“We knew we put our fate in other people’s hands, in the committee’s hands,” Wardle told USA TODAY Sports on Sunday night. “We thought we had a great year. We are a very talented and tough team. We suffered some injuries throughout the year, and especially last Saturday night with Keifer (Sykes). But we didn’t get the game done.”
Green Bay was the most deserving midmajor conference regular-season champion to be left out. Sykes and Alec Brown, who combined to average more than 35 points a game, were limited with injuries during the tournament loss. Sykes was the Horizon League player of the year, and Brown was the league’s defensive player of the year.
Though Wardle and his team knew the NIT bid was a possibility after the loss, they held out hope for an NCAA at-large bid. They were one of the first four teams left out of the field.
“I thought our résumé was pretty strong — winning our league outright by two games, beating Virginia, playing a good non-conference (schedule), beating the Conference USA champs in Tulsa,” Wardle said. “But we also knew we weren’t sure which route it would go.”
NCAA men’s basketball committee chairman Ron Wellman called the decision to exclude Green Bay and SMU a “very difficult” one. He pointed out that 21 of Green Bay’s 24 victories came against Division I teams. In addition, Green Bay’s RPI was outside of the top 50.
Wellman expounded upon the SMU snub in a conference call with reporters Sunday. The Mustangs — and head coach Larry Brown — were the first team left out of the field as they sought to return to the tournament after a 21-year absence.
“When you’re making these selections, you’re looking for differentiators,” Wellman said. “In SMU’s case, their downfall, their weakness, was their schedule.
“Their non-conference strength of schedule was ranked No. 302 out of, what do we have, 350 teams eligible for the tournament. It’s one of the worst nonconference schedules. Their overall strength of schedule was 129. That would have been by far the worst at-large strength of schedule. The next-worst was 91.”
Brown said he didn’t want to talk about the snub or the NCAA tournament. “We’re not in it,” he told USA TODAY Sports.
It didn’t help, either, that the committee showed little reverence for their conference. Fellow American Athletic Conference member Louisville is one of the hottest teams in the nation having won 29 games, and the Cards earned a No. 4 seed.