 Mike HlasHi, I'm Gazette/TheGazette.com sports columnist Mike Hlas. This is the Hlog. We will meet here, discuss things, and then go [...] |
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Hlas: Even NIT doesn’t give Hawkeyes a break
Iowa may need to win two road games to get to New York
Wow, Iowa didn’t even get a good NIT draw.
The No. 3-seed Hawkeyes host Indiana State in their first-round game Wednesday, not a Stony Brook or Robert Morris. If they win that, they would almost surely play the second game on the road, against 2-seed Massachusetts. If they win that, they would play at 1-seed Virginia unless the Cavaliers are upset at home in the first two rounds.
UMass and Virginia aren’t Duke and Louisville, but they’re better than anyone the Hawkeyes have beaten on the road this season.
A 3-seed in the NIT feels like a long way from the NCAA tournament, doesn’t it? The eyeball test clearly didn’t cut it with the NCAA men’s basketball tournament selection committee, nor should it.
The committee can’t just say, “Look how hard Iowa pushed Michigan State Friday night. Look how close the Hawkeyes came to so many wins in the nation’s best conference. Iowa clearly belongs among our 37 at-large picks.”
On a neutral court, who among you wouldn’t pick Iowa as at least even-Steven against at-large choices Middle Tennessee State, St. Mary’s, Boise State, LaSalle, … Illinois and Minnesota?
But results are results. With a fluffy nonconference schedule and a Big Ten slate that let the Hawkeyes play Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State and Illinois just once, Iowa simply didn’t win enough games.
Iowa was 5-9 against NCAA tourney teams, and didn’t beat any of them away from home except for Western Kentucky on a neutral court. It only won two true road games all season. It beat only one team that is higher than a No. 7 NCAA seed (No. 5 Wisconsin). It lost at Purdue and Nebraska. Worst of all in the NCAA’s eyes, probably, it played way too many nonconference teams that were among the worst teams in the worst leagues.
He won't be playing for Indiana State Wednesday
Had the Hawkeyes just mildly altered any of those facts and figures for the better, they’re probably playing in the big tournament this week.
Iowa is better than last season, is clearly pointed in the right direction, all that good stuff. But while the NIT was a fun deal last year for a Hawkeyes team lucky to get invited, it will only be enjoyable for Iowa this season if it wins its way to New York for that Final Four. Which it certainly could, by the way.
Still, it’s the NIT. And, it’s a seventh-straight season without an NCAA appearance for Iowa. That’s a long time. This program would have been been better off with a first-game loss in the NCAAs than a multiple-game stint in the NIT. March Madness is the only event in which you would rather perform in Dayton, Ohio, than Madison Square Garden.
Iowa State is going to Dayton. It has work to do to match its accomplishment of last year, which was winning a second-round game and getting to the first weekend of the NCAAs.
The difference between the resumes of the Cyclones and Hawkeyes isn’t great, but ISU owns wins over No. 4 and No. 5 (Kansas State and Oklahoma State) seeds, and played NCAA teams Cincinnati and UNLV away from Ames. Beating NCAA-bound Oklahoma last Thursday in Kansas City sure helped, too.
As a 10-seed, Iowa State’s road was going to be tough no matter where it was sent. Notre Dame is a formidable first foe. The Fighting Irish are 6-5 against NCAA teams. They beat NCAA overall No. 1-seed Louisville (well, once out of three times). They beat NCAA 3-seed Marquette in the quarterfinals of last week’s Big East tourney. They went 11-7 in that league. That was Iowa State’s Big 12 record.
The Irish start three fine guards and have a horse of a center named Jack Cooley, an All-Big East player who averages 13.1 points and 10.3 rebounds. Four of the eight players in Notre Dame’s rotation are 6-foot-9 or 6-10.
But, Notre Dame has seen few teams that play a style similar to Iowa State’s. The Cyclones average 79.6 points, fourth-best in the nation. No Big East team averages more than 73.6 points. ISU averages 9.8 three-pointers on 26.6 tries. No Big East team makes as many as eight 3-pointers per game.
So, it’s an interesting matchup. The winner gets Ohio State in Ohio. That’s still better than playing Kentucky in Louisville, which the Cyclones did in the third-round (second game) last year. And it’s much better to play Ohio State in Ohio this week than to face UMass in Massachusetts.
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Say it any way you want, but the eyes don’t lie: Minnesota (5-11 in its last 16, 0-9 current streak away from home, first round loss in conf tourney) has no business in the NCAA tourney. Period. Neither does Illinois, Middlin Tenn and many others. The selection committee should run for Congress. They’re great at spin, but have no rasp on reality.
“This (Iowa) program would have been been better off with a first-game loss in the NCAAs than a multiple-game stint in the NIT.”
I respectfully disagree. Iowa is a very young team (over 66% of the roster are freshmen or sophomores) with its best days ahead of it, and is a team that is very much capable of making a big run in the NIT, regardless of seeding or scheduling.
For such a young team, there is no replacement for game action, particularly game action against solid, but beatable opponents. The additional practices are a plus, too.
Had Iowa somehow made the NCAAs (and it appears they were farther away from getting in than once thought) they would have almost assuredly been an 11 or 12 seed playing in the Tuesday/Wednesday “First Four” Play-In games in Dayton, Ohio. These games are televised on TruTV (do you even know what channel that is?). Given that Iowa is 5-9 against teams who made it into the Big Dance, the chances of them even winning that Play-In game are (based on past performance) 35%.
I know the NCAA Tournament carries cache and prestige, but I don’t see how getting beat in a play-in game televised on TruTV is preferable to playing in 2-5 NIT games, all televised on the ESPN family of networks. Sure, you can still say you “went to an NCAA Tournament”, but Fran is already doing well on the recruiting trail.
Iowa needs to develop the talent already in the program more than it needs to worry about the miniscule recruiting lift they’d get from a possible loss in a “NCAA Tournament” play-in game.
If Iowa was a junior and senior laden team, I would make a completely opposite argument. When you have a very experienced team, you may as well get in the Big Dance and let the chips fall where they may. But, when 2/3rds of your team are freshmen and sophomores, give me the extra practices and games of the NIT to a possible play-in game loss.
Just one man’s opinion, but there happens to be a very famous college basketball coach who agrees with my premise. Bob Knight once had a very public spat with the NCAA over this exact argument. He wanted to decline an NCAA bid to go play in the NIT, as he felt it would be more beneficial to his team.
There’s an easy way to eliminate the post-season problems:
1 – Abolish all conference tournaments
2 – Start the NCAA tourney one week earlier
3 – Top 300 teams are in. (Let’s hear #301 cry they were deserving…) Top 300 determined by adding all the computer rankings. Done.
4 – NIT field is filled from the teams who are knocked out in round 1.
This would be so much more fair and would give some teams a second chance in the NIT. No good reason not to do it, and the best reason to do it would be to put an end to The Committee.
This team has no idea how to finish games. They have six losses that prove it this year. They especially do not know how to close out games on the road. Games against Massachusetts and/or Virginia might be an opportunity to learn how to do that. I do not give a rip about whether Illinois or Minnesota deserves to be in the NCAA or not. They are in. I just want these little boys to grow up and learn what they need to learn so they can play the man’s game they are supposed to be playing. More than anything else, we need one guy to emerge that can put the team on his back and close out the wins, like Matt Gatens did against four ranked teams last year. At the moment, we do not have a guy like that.
The biggest problem this year was definitely scheduling. What if Iowa had played some of these teams in the preseason and “learn[ed] how to [close games out]” then? Iowa didn’t need to play teams that they were going to beat by 20, 30, 40 points. Fran gave us all a big lecture last year about how they needed to drop the home and away with Northern Iowa after they lost in Cedar Falls. The crux of his sermon was that Iowa needed to be “flexible” in their scheduling. Fran got exactly what he wanted. And he spent his flexibility playing bad teams from bad conferences at home. While it is obvious that even if he had kept UNI on the schedule it would not have been the type of game that helped them this year (being in Carver this year and UNI struggling at the beginning of the year – it would have turned out the same as it did at the neutral site); however, Iowa needs that type of game on their schedule, not for the RPI, but for learning how to close out tough games in hostile environments. The problem was the same with Iowa this year, that it was last year. They were unable to close out tough games on the road… even at Nebraska – do you think Fran will be able to get that one taken off of the schedule too? Eventually, you have to learn to win the tough games, and the badly reffed games (as I understand the one at UNI was last year), you can’t just schedule around them. Fran tried to schedule around adversity this year, and it cost an unprepared, sometimes poorly coached, team an NCAA bid.
The NCAA selections are past. My question is this:
According to the Chair of the NCAA Committee, the last 6 teams left out were Alabama, Iowa, Kentucky, Southern Miss, Tennessee, and Virginia.
Alabama, Kentucky, Southern Miss, and Virginia are all 1 seeds in the NIT. Tennessee is a 2.
So, how does Iowa drop to a 3 seed? How could all of the media “experts” that said Iowa would be a NIT 1 seed be so wrong?
Food for thought… as we head towards super conferences and playoffs in football where the big programs are going to break from the NCAA ( It’s going to happen; just give it time), when do the major conferences push for more teams in the bball tourney? They already went to 68. Sanji is on to something but not for the reasons of equity but rather because the money will drive it.