Quote Originally Posted by smootness View Post
It's all about your resume. We have a 9-9 SEC record and a bunch of wins against crappy teams in the OOC. That's not a very good resume, which is why we're currently not in.

It's not a penalty in the sense that the committee is going to say, 'Well, they would otherwise be in based on resume, but since they scheduled poorly in the OOC, let's leave them out.' So there's not an opportunity for them to even ask, 'How much do we penalize them here?' Instead, it's, 'That resume is not as good as this resume because they have only even played __ # of teams above __ in the RPI and have only beaten __ # of teams above __ in the RPI.' So, sure, in a sense our poor OOC schedule is a penalty. But it was us penalizing ourselves by having that schedule, not the committee penalizing us. So there's no way for them to penalize us less than they are, we did that to ourselves. They are just evaluating resumes, and ours isn't great...which is pretty easy to see objectively by looking at our RPI.

If you think the committee should evaluate resumes differently, that's fine. But the bottom line is that they have an evaluation criteria (which admittedly is not always clear), and that is how they evaluate. If you were looking at another team that is 68th in the RPI with that weak an OOC schedule, it would be pretty easy for us all to dismiss them and say, 'They didn't schedule well enough, therefore their resume isn't good enough.' But it's us, so we try to look at it as more than what it is - a simple evaluation of resume.

I mean, we had people on here claiming that we had a great shot to get in because the SEC was an '8 big league' and we were one of the top 8. Well, the SEC is not an '8 bid league'...until the point at which they actually get 8 teams in. The projections have had us fall to 7 bids recently. Why? Because they evaluate resumes individually. There is no such thing as a set number of bids for a league, just like there is no such thing as the committee 'penalizing' a team for a weak OOC schedule. It just keeps you from having a stronger resume, which hurts you when it comes time to evaluate resumes.
It's somewhat semantics, but you can't penalize anybody for anything if you take the criteria as given. If the criteria was wins against ACC opponents, you're not penalizing teams not in the ACC, you're just applying the criteria.

I am starting from the assumption that generally the goal is to put the best teams in the tournament once the automatic bids are accounted for.

18 games against this year's SEC is a sufficient sample to prove that somebody is a tournament team. If we had played the 14 worst RPI teams in the country at home and gone undefeated and then gone 11-7 in the SEC, we would have proven in those 18 SEC games that we should be in based on our performance in those 18 games, but we might not be guaranteed a spot because we played bad OOC teams and as a result our RPI would be hammered. Not for losing bad OOC teams, but for playing them. That seems to fairly be called a penalty to me.