Imagine being a player, coach or fan of West Virginia today.
You were just told Sunday night that your team was No. 69, missing the NCAA men’s basketball tournament by a hair. You learn that the last team in the field was North Carolina, a blueblood with one win all year against an NCAA tournament-quality team – way back in December against UCLA.
And as you try to make sense of something seemingly so absurd, you hear that the North Carolina athletics director, Bubba Cunningham, is the chairman of the men’s basketball selection committee.
What are you going to think? Does that smell like a fair outcome where everything was on the up-and-up?
I want to be clear about one thing before we talk about what happened Sunday and the decision to include North Carolina in the field despite a 1-12 record against so-called “Quad 1” opponents in the NCAA’s somewhat complicated NET rankings.
I first met Cunningham more than 15 years ago, back when he was the athletics director at Tulsa, and have talked to him dozens of times since then. From everything I’ve learned about Cunningham over all these years, I have zero reason to doubt his integrity and have always held him in high regard among his peers.
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LEFT OUT: Six teams snubbed by the NCAA men’s tournament
I also believe that both Cunningham and the other members of the selection committee did everything by the book, which means that he left the room when North Carolina came up for discussion and wasn’t allowed to vote for or against its inclusion.
And still … it’s a miserable look for this entire process. So miserable that maybe it’s time for the NCAA to ditch the model of athletics directors and conference commissioners choosing who gets in, because these kinds of sticky situations are going to happen. And the consequences are so immense for schools and conferences that every single piece of this needs to appear independent and pristine to the public.
Unfortunately for Cunningham, this isn’t going to pass that test – even if neither he nor the committee did anything wrong.
“As the vice chair, I managed all the conversations we had about North Carolina, and we had quite a few,’ Sun Belt Conference commissioner Keith Gill said on CBS, sitting next to Cunningham as he answered the obvious question about the potential conflict of interest.
‘All the policies and procedures were followed,” Cunningham said.
Is that good enough?
Probably not for West Virginia, which had wins over Gonzaga, Arizona, Kansas and Iowa State but still found itself on the wrong side of the line.
Now, it’s important to point out that these decisions on the margins of the NCAA tournament field are always going to be fraught because by definition, the teams involved have mediocre résumés.
If you want to make a case for North Carolina, you can based on the predictive metrics like KenPom.com, where the Tar Heels are ranked No. 33 and West Virginia No. 53. In fact, among all the teams that were sweating out Selection Sunday, North Carolina had the best numbers in the power rankings.
But they didn’t have wins as good as West Virginia or Indiana, and didn’t take advantage of multiple opportunities against NCAA-quality teams in the ACC like Duke, Clemson or Louisville.
It’s also not worth crying too much for the Mountaineers. They faded a bit late in the season and put their fate in the committee’s hands with a horrendous Big 12 tournament loss to Colorado, which went 14-19.
I’m not here to tell you West Virginia was a no-brainer to put into this field, and I’m not going to be critical of the committee’s work. It has a tough job, and you can pretty much flip a coin every year when it comes down to decisions over the last couple of teams in or out of the field.
But the appearance of it is undeniably problematic when you get a situation like this that’s so clearly going to inspire conspiracy theories and accusations of favoritism.
‘It weighed on me a lot,’ Cunningham said later on an NCAA conference call with reporters. ‘I’ll say it also weighs on commissioners and other ADs when it comes to seeding when a commissioner has multiple teams under consideration.
‘You have a personal, professional responsibility at your institution but you’re on a committee that represents the membership, and I think people recognize that and honor it. I think you can sometimes say less in any setting because you want to make sure you don’t even get up to that line of integrity, and I think that’s just part of what we have to work through the way the committee is designed to represent the membership.’
For decades, the college-sports model has been built around the idea that athletics directors and conference commissioners should be the ones making these decisions and doing the work of these committees because it gives them a stake in the integrity of the process and accountability to their peers. At some point, Cunningham is going to be in a room with West Virginia athletics director Wren Baker, and there’s something to be said for the idea that they can look each other in the eye and know that Baker may one day be in a similar situation.
That may be good for professional comity in NCAA committee meetings, but it feels a little old fashioned these days for both the NCAA basketball tournaments and the College Football Playoff.
The stakes – both financially and professionally – are sky-high these days. And the amount of media attention on the process means that even the best protocols to ensure objectivity will be subject to skepticism.
It puts Cunningham and other committee members in a no-win situation. Even if a totally clean decision was made, the outcome feels a little too dirty.