After Syracuse lost a tough ACC first round game against Pitt 72-71, Syracuse’s hall of fame coach Jim Boeheim had the following quote to make his plea to be included in the dance.<\/p>\n
“The basketball committee is not the infractions committee,” Boeheim said (quote was obtained by ESPN)\u00a0 “Their job is to pick the best teams for the tournament. These guys had nothing to do with any of this and should be evaluated on how well they played. They’ve been punished enough.”<\/p>\n
To me, this is disgusting, and I hope the Selection Committee on Sunday comes back with this final answer.\u00a0\u00a0 Jim Boeheim is right that we are not the infractions committee, but unfortunately for Jim, they are not one of the best teams and thus did not make the tournament.<\/p>\n
As of this year, lets be clear, the Syracuse players have not been punished – Boeheim was.\u00a0\u00a0 Wisconsin had their amazing coach retire, and all the Badgers did was play better for their interim coach.\u00a0 Michigan State lost their best player for 4 games, and they didn’t lose their two games to\u00a0the two teams that would be RPI equivalents to Syracuse’s losses to Clemson and St. John’s.\u00a0\u00a0 Yes, Boeheim missed 9 games, but Syracuse’s best players did not – those players finished as the 9 seed in the ACC tournament (only because Louisville was ineligible – where another hall of fame coach needs to just stop talking and accept his punishment – if what is being said is true, Pitino should consider himself lucky if the NCAA doesn’t go and slap a few more years of post-season bans on top of Louisville’s self-imposed sanctions), and lost to a fellow bubble team.<\/p>\n
Syracuse had some great wins.\u00a0\u00a0 And the ACC has an unbalanced schedule – so their seed could be tied to having to play a tougher schedule.\u00a0 But then come out and say that.\u00a0 Say that you think that Syracuse has already shown that they are deserving through their victories against Duke, Texas A&M, Notre Dame, St. Bonaventure and Connecticut.\u00a0 But stop giving excuses.\u00a0 Its hard to believe the loss at Pittsburgh early in the season was because the coach was out – considering that the Panthers then went on to win two more times when the coach was on the bench.\u00a0 That then makes it hard to believe that the loss to Miami FL – a better team than Pittsburgh – was also not simply because of going on the road against an excellent team.\u00a0 And if you are one of the best teams, you simply don’t lose to\u00a08-24 St. John’s.\u00a0 So don’t go there.\u00a0 Stop telling other people what their responsibility is – when you were punished for letting things get out of control on your watch.<\/p>\n
The Selection Committee hopefully also knows that their job is to pick the best teams.\u00a0 They don’t need a lecture on that from a coach who allowed academic fraud, illegal booster support, and failed compliance with drug testing on what their responsibilities are.\u00a0\u00a0 I will be honest that I haven’t looked close enough at the bubble to know if Syracuse’s resume deserves to be in.\u00a0\u00a0 But I do know that there are multiple regular season champions of small conferences that did everything that you should in the regular season including beating a top 50 RPI team from a major conference – including St. Mary’s (27-5), Valparaiso (26-6), Monmouth (27-7), and Wichita St (24-8) – that need an at-large bid because they were upset in their conference tournament.\u00a0\u00a0 If it is a punishment for a middle of the road power conference team to not make the tournament, it seems like it would be a harsher punishment to not award these regular season champions (who by the way, don’t have any legitimate punishments from the NCAA on their record).\u00a0\u00a0 And yet my gut says that at least one of these regular season champions\u00a0will be going to the NIT – my hopes it isn’t because a hall of fame coach gave an excuse and a sad story to convince the committee that\u00a0Syracuse’s players\u00a0deserve the spot more – they simply don’t.<\/p>\n
OK\u00a0– my rant is over for now.\u00a0 Who knows – maybe even I will put Syracuse in my bracketology work over the weekend when I look at team resumes.\u00a0 But I won’t be giving Syracuse the benefit of the doubt for their 9 games while Boeheim is being punished – there isn’t enough evidence to believe his presence caused them to lose those 5 games.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After Syracuse lost a tough ACC first round game against Pitt 72-71, Syracuse’s hall of fame coach Jim Boeheim had the following quote to make his plea to be included in the dance. “The basketball committee is not the infractions committee,” Boeheim said (quote was obtained by ESPN)\u00a0 “Their job is to pick the best […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog2016"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=825"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":826,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825\/revisions\/826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}