This season, Syracuse beat the most talented team in the country (Duke), the top-scoring defense in the country (Virginia) and perhaps the deepest team in the country (Florida State), but the Orange couldn’t beat their shaky odds of returning to the NCAA Tournament.
The big brand name, the Hall of Fame coach and the winning record in the country’s best conference weren’t enough to send Syracuse (18-14, 10-8) to the Big Dance for the 33rd time under Jim Boeheim, who will miss the NCAA Tournament for just the second time since 2008, and just the seventh time since 1982.
The Orange, who snuck into the field as a 10-seed last season and made an unlikely run to the Final Four, won six games against top-50 RPI teams — all at home — but were ultimately undone after losing five of their final seven games and finishing with a 2-11 record away from home.
Last year, Syracuse made history by making the NCAA Tournament with the worst-ever RPI (72) for an at-large team, but this year’s version ended up ranked 84th, thanks to a soft non-conference schedule, an 11-9 start to the season and five losses to teams with an RPI above 100, including St. John’s, Georgetown and Boston College.
After his team lost its only game of the ACC Tournament to Miami, Boeheim, 72, still said he believed the Orange would get in because of the strength of the nation’s best conference.
“I know our profile is better this year than it was last year,” Boeheim said. “We are universally felt to be the No. 1 conference in the country, and we finished tied for seventh. … If we’re the best conference, then we should get more than 50 percent in the tournament.”
The ACC did, garnering nine bids, including 11th-seeded Wake Forest, which earned one of the final four spots, along with Providence, USC and Kansas State. Though Syracuse was crestfallen, no team had a bigger gripe than Illinois State, who hoped to make the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1998, and instead became just the latest in a long line of mid-major teams overlooked — like Monmouth last year — because of the perceived weakness of the Missouri Valley Conference, which had no other top-100 teams in the RPI other than Wichita State.
The Redbirds (27-6, 17-1) had a stronger RPI (33) than Wake Forest (39), USC (41), Providence (56) and Kansas State (57), but couldn’t make up for their 123rd-ranked strength of schedule. Illinois State, which finished ahead of 16 at-large teams in RPI, is one of just 10 teams in NCAA Tournament history to be left out of the field with an RPI so high, hurt by having the 150th-ranked non-conference strength of schedule — a fact, coach Dan Muller quickly pointed out after the Selection Show, is largely out of their control.
“We ask dozens of schools to play us every year and they won’t. Don’t talk to me about scheduling,” Muller told reporters Sunday night. “My team is crushed. We feel we should be in, but we aren’t. It’s tough to take.”
Rhode Island had snatched up one of the final bids earlier Sunday by winning the Atlantic 10 Tournament, also hurting the chances of California, Georgia, Iowa and California.
