The work Georgetown did by reclaiming the Big East Tournament Championship did not just ruin Crayton’s Saturday evening and caused outrage from Syracuse to Boise. Hoyes also did a challenging job for members of the NCAA men’s basketball committee.
Known colloquially as the “selection committee”, how they should now sow the field filled with elite mid-major teams, successful major-conference teams and this year’s powerhouse is a Georgetown team, four games in four days Won and still managed to scramble for a position over the -500 mark.
For Hoyes, getting the chance to play in the NCAA for the first time since 2015 is “everything”, as coach Patrick Ewing told Fox Sports late Saturday. We started from the bottom; We are now number 1 in the Big East. “
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The Hoys were finalized in the league’s official pre-poll poll, and came close, finishing eighth in the 11-team league with a 7-9 record. The four wins he won this week at Madison Square Garden took his overall record of the season to 13–12.
But he won four games in four days, two of which were fighting against NCAA-bound teams and one against a Seton Hall team to achieve a major level, but were unsuccessful with a semi-final defeat to the Hoys. That’s why seeding them in the NCAA bracket is a nightmare.
Hoyes would have to be elevated to place Georgetown on the No. 12 line, which would have had zero chance of joining the NCAA region without winning the Big East tournament, which had teams like Drake and Syracuse. He probably earned his place in the region during the entire season and may need to play an extra game in the first four to gain the right to face No. 5 in the first round.
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To place Hoyes too deep in the bracket, say as a 14th seed, would be to force a team that excelled all season and earned the No. 3 seed to deal with a team that just now Creighton destroyed 73–48. Hoyce’s best-known player, center Cudus Wahab, averaged 12.5 points, 7.9 rebounds and 1.6 blocks. Guard Jahon Blair averaged 15.7 points. Freshman guard Dante Harris was the breakout star of the Big East Championship, with 18 points against Villanova, 15 against Seton Hall, and 10 in the Crayton win, nearly doubling his total double-figure scoring game for the year.
The NCAA has not dealt with such a problem in more than a decade. Automatic qualifiers from major conferences in 2019, the last time we had March Madness, the average record was 28-8. In conferences accustomed to building multiple tournament entrants, usually someone who qualifies as a big team claims an AQ spot.
The last time anything like this happened, interestingly enough, the last time a major conference tournament was completed in a relatively empty gym.
In 2008, the Southeastern Conference was holding its championship tournament at the Georgia Dome. As Mississippi State and Alabama were fighting late Friday night with their quarter-final game time, a tornado blew through the city of Atlanta and damaged the building. The teams were able to complete that game, but the damage was significant enough that the league moved the rest of the event to the Alexander Memorial Coliseum at Georgia Tech.
Because most ticketholders could not be accommodated, the SEC elected to allow only bands, cheer squads, and family members to attend. From all of that, a Georgia Bulldogs team that entered the SEC Championship at 13-16 won four games in a row – three of them over NCAA tournament-bound opponents – and claimed an automatic bid.
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The Bulldogs were placed on the bracket with 14 seeds. It certainly wasn’t a great team, but it was led by future NBA guard Sundiata Gaines and two more players who went on to become 1,000-point scorers in a near-high league. Xavier’s coach, whose team earned the No. 3 seed with a 27–6 regular season, was not happy to face him with that degree of talent in first-round games. The Musketeers won the game and the Elite went to eight. But he faced a mid-major conference champion.
Someone near the top of this year’s NCAA bracket would treat a first-round opponent like few others: A high-key conference champion handed a double-digit seed.
Depending on how the Hoys performed during the Big East tournament in a similar situation, this may just be the draw they are hoping to see.
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