WBB : SU misses NCAA tournament for 3rd consecutive season, will move on to WNIT
Quentin Hillsman said he was confident in his team’s chances of making the NCAA tournament before the selection show Monday. But after 45 minutes of watching as the seedings and matchups were announced, all the Syracuse head coach Hillsman and the rest of the Orange were left with was another shot at the women’s National Invitation Tournament.
‘Obviously, the players are very disappointed,’ Hillsman said. ‘We wanted to get into the NCAA tournament. We understand that the first step to winning a national championship is to actually be in the tournament. We understood that.’
The NCAA selection committee left the Orange (22-9, 9-6 Big East) out of the field Monday night when it announced the tournament bracket, largely due to what selection committee chair Marilyn McNeil later said was the recurring weakness in its nonconference schedule.
Syracuse will move on to the WNIT for the third consecutive season, play in which starts Thursday against Monmouth in the Carrier Dome.
SU’s computer numbers may have been the decisive factor to keep it out of the tournament. Syracuse’s was ranked No. 54 in the RPI and its strength of schedule was 114th in the country.
‘We looked at them very, very carefully,’ McNeil said in a teleconference after the field was announced. ‘There were some concerns for Syracuse, as there was for many of the teams that did not make the field. One of them always has been a factor, and that is the non-conference schedule. We look at that very closely. Syracuse also had nine losses against top 50 teams.
‘So they were a team that had some blemishes in their record, and enough unfortunately to leave them out of the 33.’
Syracuse’s resume boasted wins over five teams picked for the tournament field, including a signature nonconference victory over Big Ten champion Ohio State on Dec. 11.
The Buckeyes earned a No. 4 seed in the tournament, but the next-best non-league victory for the Orange was a 94-60 triumph over Northeast conference champion St. Francis (Pa.).
McNeil said some of the decisions were so tough you could slide a piece of paper between the teams that got in and teams that didn’t. She also remarked, in answering a question about SU, that it isn’t all about the numbers.
‘At the end of many discussions — and there were lots of discussions, Syracuse in many of them,’ McNeil said. ‘You kind of put down your computer and you put away your papers and you talk about how they would do on the floor and how they would do in the tournament.’
Still, Hillsman felt SU did enough to warrant a tournament birth. He had said throughout the year that if his team got to 10 Big East wins, that would be enough to get it into the field.
‘Obviously, we don’t know,’ Hillsman said. ‘I know I don’t know. Because I thought 10 (conference wins) was it. The only thing that I do know is the more games you win, the better chance you have of getting in the tournament.’
The players were not made available for comment after the tournament field was announced. They began trickling out of the Carmelo K. Anthony Basketball Center 20 minutes after the final pairing was announced.
But from the very beginning of this season, senior Erica Morrow was talking about getting back to NCAA Tournament. Missing out on it for the third consecutive season, she said, would be nothing less than a disappointment.
‘It would be definitely a disappointment for me, definitely for the program,’ Morrow said on the team’s media day Oct. 18. ‘… We’re trying to rebuild the program here back in Syracuse. It’s my last opportunity so it’d be, personally, a disappointment for me.’
Hillsman did not come to the podium until 40 minutes after the bracket was finalized. He said all he told his team was there was more basketball to be played and that he would see them for practice in the morning.
Hillsman also said in his press conference that the scheduling issue would be addressed if that was the deciding factor in Syracuse being left out. But he added that he had no regrets about what his Orange did this year.
‘We’re 12-1 in our non-league and we beat some teams that won their conference tournaments,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to look back at that and regret anything that we did in our non-league. I’m not going to look back and regret anything in our conference besides not pulling out a couple more games that we had a chance to win.’
Published on March 14, 2011 at 12:00 pm
