NCAA Tournament Selection

Selection Sunday sets the field for the NCAA’s men’s basketball tournament that begins Wednesday night. Office pools and brackets will take over copy machines, suck bandwidth as workers watch games on their computers and March Madness will infect everyone for the next three weeks.

Some of it affected the Selection Committee on Sunday. There are a million little gripes about who got seeded where and has to travel where, who got stuck in which bracket, who got left out. Here we only want to deal with one issue: the University of Dayton.

Dayton made a stunning run to the Elite Eight last year. It’s a plucky mid-major program with a promising coach in Archie Miller. And the Flyers were nothing if not the grittiest of teams this year.

In mid-December, the Flyers put their starting center and a key backup off the team for an alleged dorm room theft. They lost another player to concussions. Three guys who were 6-9 were gone. The Flyers were essentially left with seven players, one of them a walk-on, none of the seven taller than 6-6.

They played their seven to a 25-8 record, falling in the finals of the Atlantic 10 tournament to Virginia Commonwealth. No college basketball expert or ‘bracketologist’ had Dayton on the NCAA tournament bubble. The Selection Committee had other ideas. It essentially made Dayton the 68th and last team to qualify for the tournament, putting it in the First Four – a play-in to the actual tournament. Dayton, which just played three games in three days in New York, now must take the court against Boise State on Wednesday.

In messing with Dayton, the committee also messed with Boise State. The play-in game is … in Dayton.

Eventually the NCAA title will be settled by the teams. Maybe there’s no way to set a perfect bracket and be fair to everyone. But the Selection Committee did Dayton wrong, and many hope Dayton shows it exactly how wrong.

ELSEWHERE

Kevin Harvick continued his dominance of the NASCAR season by winning his fourth consecutive race at Phoenix International Raceway on Sunday. He now has seven consecutive top two finishes. … Jordan Spieth birdied the third playoff hole to win the Valspar Championship Sunday in Palm Harbor, Florida. … LeBron James is questionable for a return game in Miami against the Heat on Monday night. He tweaked his knee in the Cleveland Cavaliers’ Sunday night win over the Orlando Magic.
 
 
Post By: Larry Weisman, a longtime sportswriter for USA TODAY, blogs for Twistity.com. Follow him on Twitter @MrLarryWeisman .