But not in a good way.
ESPN.com columnist Pat Forde named the winners and losers of the first four days of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.
Not surprisingly, the Mountain West Conference earned “loser” status. Here’s what Forde wrote:
Loser: Mountain West Conference. Four teams entered, none remains. And neither New Mexico nor BYU came close to winning its second-round game.
As Gazette columnist David Ramsey pointed out in his blog earlier this week, it’s not the first time the league has fallen flat in The Big Dance. MWC teams are 10-26 all-time, none has moved past the Sweet 16 and only two have made it that far. Yikes.
All season long we hear MWC coaches tell us how strong the league is and how it doesn’t get the respect it deserves. Forgive us for rolling our eyes when those claims are made next year.
Interesting comments. Did the MWC do as well getting to the 3d round (Sweet 16) or better? No. Did the teams that defeated all the four MWC teams go to the Sweet 16? Yes. Not good to lose, but losing to quality teams is a differnt story. Guess we can readdress this after we see how those teams do in the next 10 days or so!
To look at the rpi of those four teams and how they played througout the year and to suggest that the league was not comparitively stronger this year than in the past, is not looking at the big picture. As always, different views and opinions!
I guess an argument can be made each year for why the conference didn’t perform well at that year’s NCAA Tournament. But what’s so damning is the cumulative performance. 11 years, two Sweet 16 appearances, no Elite Eight appearances and a bunch of first-round flops.
A league can’t play like that at The Big Dance and then act indignant about being labeled “a mid-major”
And I wasn’t comparing the strength of the league to the strength of the league in previous seasons, I was commenting on the strength of the league compared to other leagues.
RJP – Losing is losing is losing.
The MWC didn’t get a team into the Sweet 16.
Again.
The Big Picture is this:
A conference is judged on how far its teams travel in the NCAA Tournament.
And that means the MWC deserves harsh judgement.
There is absolutely no way to dance around that truth.
What’s frustrating is that the top teams in the MWC generally do quite well in nonconference games in Nov and Dec (even going back to our “Halcyon days”, as Pat Forde puts it.) This year was no exception to that, but it still shows the MWC still has a lot to prove on the national stage at the tournament.