Get snubbed once, and you eventually get over it. But get snubbed more than once? Well, then it becomes a tradition. A tradition the Northwest Conference is starting to get used to.
Sunday the Whitworth University football team was left out of the 32-team Div. III playoff despite an 8-2 overall record and a 8-1 Div. III record. The Pirates won the NWC without a blemish, and the NWC is no easy conference. Since joining the NCAA Div. II in 1998, the NWC has produced two national champions (PLU in '99 and Linfield in '04) and totes a 18-10 playoff record in that span.
Yet that was not enough for the selection committee who chose Univ. of Wisconsin-Eau Claire over the Pirates. The Blugolds finished second in the WIAC with an 8-2 Div. III record, slightly behind Whitworth's.
"It was a very difficult decision, but Whitworth did not have as high a ranking as the other teams when a full analysis of the selection criteria was performed," Wayne Burrow, NCAA Director of Div. III Football Championships, said in an e-mail Sunday. "I would also point out that Whitworth's loss to Redlands played a major factor in how the teams were ultimately ranked in the region."
Okay, so let's get this straight: Whitworth's one D-3 loss was on opening day to Redlands, the only playoff-bound team from the west. UW-EC's losses? To UW-Whitewater, a playoff-bound team and WIAC champion, and to UW-River Falls who finished their season with a stellar 3-7 record.
Sounds like somebody needs to take notes from John McCain's "Straight Talk Express."
Let's look at some more facts.
Although the NWC doesn't have an automatic qualifier (yet; the NWC will start to receive an AQ starting next season), it seems like a champion from a notoriously tough conference would get one of the seven Pool C spots (teams who are in conferences without AQ's and "bubble" teams). After all, a nearly .650 winning percentage in the conference's history means they match up well against the competition across the country, right?
Apparently not. And this isn't the first time something like this has happened.
Last year Whitworth's softball team was left on the outside looking in, despite posting a 30-6 record and being nationally ranked. And over the years of Whitworth's dominance in men's soccer, you could have easily made an argument for Univ. of Puget Sound to have posted a record good enough for an at-large birth more than once.
But perhaps the most stunning exclusion came in 2005, when the Whitworth women's basketball team posted a 22-3 record, good enough for second place in the tough NWC. So imagine the shock when the women did not see Whitworth in the pairings, and instead learned that Wesleyan was in.
Only Wesleyan didn't know it.
That's because the Connecticut school was so sure their fourth place finish in the NESCAC and quarterfinal loss in their conference tournament would end their season, that they had already turned in their uniforms for the season.
So is this all about the travel budget of the NCAA instead of deserving teams and defining a real champion?
"I can assure you that there is no geographic bias...My job as staff liaison is to sit in with the committee and work with them to assure that all the criteria is followed," Burrow said. "There was never a point in the committee's evaluation of Whitworth when the topic of geographics was discussed."
So if this isn't about "geographics," what is this about? How did UW-Eau Claire, ranked below Whitworth in the second-to-last regional rankings, suddenly jump the Pirates in the final rankings even though both teams won their final game? How can you deny a team, whose senior-led defense had the best turnover margin in the nation, a spot in the playoffs because they happen to be located in the wrong region (known by some as "west of the Mississippi").
So please excuse me, Mr. Burrow, if I question that this isn't about where the schools are located. These ridiculous and absurd selections that have denied deserving NWC teams have happened one too many times.
Actually, make that four too many times.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Whitworth softball 2007 is right up there with big time shaft job. 29-3 against everyone outside of National and Conference Champion Linfield (Linfield took 3-4 from the Pirates). Linfield won the national championship game with the mercy rule...Whitworth was ranked in the top ten before the final season series against Linfield, dropped to 14th in the next poll, then dropped out of the rankings the final weekend without even playing. Willamette, Linfield, and Whitworth all spent time in the top-10 nationally, yet only Linfield went to the tournament. Had Whitworth won the final game of the season against Linfield they would have won the conference and auto birth. Chances are that Linfield would have been left out of the tournament as they played a nearly identical schedule as the Pirates, with nearly identical records. This was a big time snub...
Agreed. If Linfield had won the NWC football title this year with the same 6-0 NWC record as Whitworth, would they have been snubbed? Probably not. Why? Most likely because of name recognition. But that's all speculation. One thing all NWC fans can agree on is that this decision to not include the Pirates is a slap in the face to the entire conference.
Post a Comment