For the second time in six years, Selection Sunday offered CSU players, coaches, administrators and fans more March sadness than March madness.
The NCAA men’s basketball tournament bracket for 2021 was announced late Sunday afternoon, and the CSU failed to make it despite 18 wins in total and 14 all-time high wins in the Mountain West Conference game.
The nudge had an eerily similar feeling to selection Sunday 2015, when the rams of then coach Larry Eustachy were among the first four teams to be passed over for this year’s bracket, even though the CSU set a 27-6 record and had achieved a Ratings Percentage Index rank of No. 29 nationally.
The regular season of the CSU ended on Friday with a 62:50 loss to Utah State in the semifinals of the Mountain West conference tournament. The setback has been viewed by some national experts as a kind of « playoff game » between two rival league programs on the NCAA tournament bubble.
The Rams (18-6) have been seen in the past few weeks as one of around ten teams battling for one of the last big places in the field, including Louisville (13-7) and Maryland (16-13) ) belonged), Ole Miss (16-11), Saint Louis (14-6), St. Bonaventure (16-4), Syracuse (16-9), UCLA (17-9), VCU (19-7), Xavier (13-8), Memphis (16-8), Drake (25-4) and the compatriots of Mountain West, Utah State (20-8) and Boise State (18-8).
Half an hour before the selection show, the country’s two leading bracketologists projected that the Rams would be right on the fence of the NCAA selection committee. However, they did not agree on the ultimate fate of the CSU.
As of 3:30 p.m. on Sunday in Denver, CBS Sports’ Jerry Palm listed the Rams as one of his last teams to be 11-seeded in a first four match against the Pac-12 Bruins. The winner met Clemson with the sixth seed. ESPN’s Joe Lunardi listed CSU as one of his last two teams after Wichita State (16-5).
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Like six years ago, the Rams’ résumé in March was solid, but not a slam dunk. On Sunday morning, the CSU ranked 51st nationwide in the NCAA’s NET ranking component, one of the critical criteria by which the committee evaluates and compares programs.
The challenges of the coronavirus and the fighting in the lower half of the mountain west also limited the number of quality opponents on the CSU schedule. The Rams finished the regular season with a 2-4 record against Quad-1 opponents and were 1-2 against Quad-2 opponents. More than half of the 18 CSU wins – 10 – were against Quad-4 competition (10-0).
While the CSU profile showed no so-called « bad losses », some of the signature gains of the Power 5 colleagues they were compared to were also missing. The Strength of the Rams’ Schedule (SOS) ranked 106th in the country on Sunday afternoon. their non-conference SOS took 143rd place.
Ref: https://www.denverpost.com
