Mountain West Conference overlooked by NCAA tournament selection committee
LAS VEGAS — An eccentric land with a 12-member committee in a meeting room auditing basketball CVs for a Selection Sunday often supplies the phenomenon of aggrieved conferences. While the Big East certainly qualifies and sulks with its mere three bids, the one conference to watch even more this men’s March Madness went from a hothouse of a season to a madhouse of a conference tournament to a funhouse of six bids to, oh no, a bummer at the seedings of those bids.
“But you know what, that’s fine, they always disrespect our league,” Colorado State Coach Niko Medved told reporters in Fort Collins after the Rams were assigned to a play-in game Tuesday night against Virginia.
“That’s one of the worst screw jobs I’ve seen,” Gonzaga Coach Mark Few told reporters in Spokane, Wash., about Boise State, coached by former Gonzaga assistant Leon Rice, after the Broncos were assigned to another play-in game Wednesday night against Colorado.
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Richard Pitino, the New Mexico coach and former Minnesota coach, said the league in question had felt like the equal of the Big Ten.
The Mountain West, that 11-team outfit with gorgeous settings and seven top teams running around pummeling each other this season, broke its 25-year lifetime record with six bids, tying the better-seeded Big Ten behind only the SEC and the Big 12. It had breathed all year as a deserved darling of the in-the-know crowd. Yet now it will fight to justify those bids from seed lines that make the justifying harder, perhaps the latest case of that old Eastern bias.
The committee hurled two of the teams — Boise State (22-10) and Colorado State (24-10) — into the annual four-team holding pen in Dayton. It placed tournament champion New Mexico (26-9) as a No. 11, regular season runner-up Nevada (26-7) as a No. 10 and regular season champion Utah State (27-6) as a No. 8. San Diego State (24-10), the kingpin program that finished last spring as national runner-up, got a No. 5 from the glow of its nonconference wins at Gonzaga and against St. Mary’s.
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It told of the untold fights they had all winter that the Nos. 5 and 6 seeds scraped to the conference final this past Saturday at Thomas & Mack Center next to the statue of Jerry Tarkanian chewing a towel. The final between San Diego State and New Mexico boomed with the din of urgency. Two large traveling fan bases had arrived, and state flags of New Mexico bounced in the stands.
At one point almost midway through the first half, when braggadocio New Mexico guard Jaelen House (the son, nephew and grandson of NBA players) slid and sliced up the court like water on a fast break and soared for a layup only to have Miles Byrd soar more from behind for a thunderous block, the cheer was so guttural, so laced with beauteous contempt, that anyone not hooked before would have gone hooked.
Effort raged and gasped all over the floor, including from conference stars such as San Diego State Hercules Jaedon LeDee and New Mexico guards House, the son of Eddie House, and Jamal Mashburn Jr., also an NBA son, of course.
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“I really liked our team [as the season began],” said Pitino, whose team won, 68-61, for the automatic bid. “I felt like we could compete with anybody, but there were a lot of good teams that we were going against, and there were a lot of teams — obviously we’re going to get six in the NCAA tournament. UNLV [No. 7] is as good as any of them as well. So it was just like made-for-TV every single night. Great players. Great coaches. Fan bases that truly care. I remember coming here [in 2021] thinking, ‘All right, maybe it’s a little bit of a step down from the Big Ten.’ It didn’t feel like it on a nightly basis. It really didn’t. I mean, packed houses, national TV. There were just wars every night. I know I got better as a coach going against some of these amazing coaches and programs. It was a long, long season but very rewarding.”
While bracketologists around the land joined the chorus of surprise at the seedings, the Mountain West had become one of those conferences with teams sick enough of each other that they might benefit from seeing somebody else.
“Yeah, no question,” said San Diego State Coach Brian Dutcher, whose 2022-23 team pulled up five points shy of national champion Connecticut with 5:19 left on the closing Monday night. He said of the conference final: “This is a Mountain West game. They’re all like this. They’re all close. They’re all hard-fought. … Everybody knows each other. They know what they do. They take away each other’s strengths, and then it comes down to a timely play or two.”
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“Yeah, I mean, this league was phenomenal this year,” said San Diego State guard Lamont Butler, who hit the famed game-winner in the Final Four against Florida Atlantic last April. He thinks it “really prepared us for the tournament coming up.”
“You can’t take any games for granted this year in the league,” LeDee said, “and that’s kind of how it is in the tournament, so it was good preparation.”
Utah State Coach Danny Sprinkle looked around the interview room after a semifinal loss to San Diego State and said: “Even looking at all these signs, I’m tired of seeing some of these logos. It is [true], but that’s the great thing about the Mountain West is it builds you for the tournament because every game we play is like a tournament game. The atmospheres we play in, the venues in the Mountain West Conference, are tremendous. The intensity, the physicality, all that is going to help our whole entire league once we get into the tournament.”
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Now off they go as a group to watch. Boise State and Colorado State will try to turn their snubs to fuel in Dayton against Virginia and Colorado. San Diego State will get No. 12 seed Alabama Birmingham (23-11) in Spokane. Nevada will play No. 7 seed Dayton (24-7) in Salt Lake City in the only first-round game to pit teams both ranked as recently as last week. New Mexico has No. 6 seed Clemson (21-11) in Memphis. Utah State plays No. 9 seed TCU (21-12) in Indianapolis.
That’s all for a league Nevada Coach Steve Alford described as “the best it’s ever been” in his 11 years coaching in it. “The last 2½ months,” he said, “have been an unbelievable stretch of good basketball in the Mountain West Conference.” Now it’s time for the hard art of ratifying — and from hard spots on the brackets.
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