If he would have been on the sideline, the decision made by the officials on March 11 last year would have sent Jim Boeheim into a frenzy – hands waving in the air, that ‘you’ve got to be kidding me’ look on his face.

But Boeheim wasn’t on the court. He was at home, watching television with his players and his family. And the officials didn’t wear stripes or don whistles. They had pens and paper.

The call they made that day set the stage for the preeminent issue in Big East men’s basketball.

The NCAA Tournament selection committee excluded Syracuse from the NCAA Tournament. The decision – a controversial one, to say the least – caused Boeheim to immediately question if being in the 16-team behemoth that is the Big East was harming his program’s chances at making March Madness.

‘If 10-6 in the Big East isn’t good enough to get us in, then I don’t think we should be in the Big East,’ Boeheim said in a press conference later that day.

As Selection Sunday 2008 draws closer, the issue Boeheim brought up nearly 11 months ago is on the mind of coaches around the league. Is the size of the Big East keeping tournament-worthy teams out of the dance?

When all was said and done, the 2007 field included six teams from the Big East, Pac-10 and Big Ten and seven from the Atlantic Coast Conference. On the surface, that seems even, but Big East coaches are quick to point out their league has four more teams than any other major conference, ever since the conferences realigned in 2005.

There has always been speculation among coaches that the committee keeps a finite number of teams that can get in, based on each conference.

But its members claims that’s not true.

‘It’s not a team in X conference versus another team in X conference,’ said Tom O’Connor, George Mason athletic director and chair of the selection committee. ‘It’s really a global look at the composite profile of that team and how they’ve done over the course of the season.

‘Quite frankly, conference affiliation never falls into our early discussions of a team being selected.’

In the two NCAA tournaments since it added four teams, the Big East hasn’t received invites for any more than half of its members invited. But the ACC, Big Ten, Pac-10 all have. Since the field expanded to 64 teams in 1985, there have been 17 occasions when a conference has had more than half of its constituency in the tournament. One of those occasions belonged to the Big East, in 1994. Twelve of those times it’s been the Big 10 that’s had half of its teams invited, according to data compiled by the Big East.

It’s data like this that leads Big East coaches to the conclusion they’re being conspired against. For some veteran coaches, who spoke out about the issue at the conference’s media day in October, the SU snub was just the latest example.

‘To see what happened to Syracuse last year was just a travesty,’ Providence’s Tim Welsh said.

‘When I didn’t see Syracuse, I was concerned,’ said Jay Wright of Villanova. ‘… I knew this was something we had to address.’

Even the commissioner chimed in.

‘I’m anxious to see what occurs, and if there’s a reoccurrence then I think we’ve got a big problem on our hands,’ Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese said. ‘I pray to God that’s not the case.’

It could be worse, though. In the past two years, the Big 12 has received only eight bids, compared to 14 from the Big East. And the ACC and Southeastern Conference are right there with the Big East, placing only 2 percent more teams in the tourney.

O’Connor admits although he tries to put conference affiliation out of mind in the deliberation room, to truly do so isn’t possible. On Selection Sunday, when he gets a stat sheet on a certain bubble team, he often covers up the team name with a piece of paper so as not to be influenced by knowing what conference the school belongs to.

But as he looks down the schedule, it’s impossible not to figure it out. And when the committee leaves the deliberating room with the field of 65 set, there will always be teams and conferences that feel they got the short end of the stick.

‘When we leave that room, we look each other in the eye and say, ‘Well there are a lot of good teams we took a look at,” O’Connor said. ”And X team may have been a good team. We thought that there were 34 teams better than that team.”

Last year, he said, Syracuse was one of those teams.

Choosing the 34 at-large bids will be even harder this year, after three conferences added another layer of difficulty to the already complex process. The Big East, Big Ten and Pac-10 added two more conference games for each team, bringing the total to 18 games. The ACC, Big 12 and SEC will continue to play 16-game schedules.

The jury is still out on how that will affect teams in the end. In terms of how a league looks overall, every one of those games will be a split – a win for one team and a loss for another. But for non-conference games, Big East clubs win at a rate of about 75 percent, said Dan Gavitt, Big East associate commissioner for men’s basketball.

At the same time, more league games provide more opportunities for a team to get a quality win to bolster a tournament resume, rather than scheduling the extra two games against weaker non-conference opponents.

‘It’s a great glass-half full, glass half-empty debate,’ Gavitt said.

But the numbers may already be suffering. The Big East currently sits in fourth place in conference RPI, one of the indicators used by the selection committee. And the parity of the league – nine teams currently have either five or six wins – could be worrisome to coaches. Syracuse went from 13th in the conference standings to sixth in just one week.

O’Connor maintains that numbers are only half the battle. While he keeps up with the numbers, he has also, as of last Thursday, watched 44 teams in person and countless more on TV. He and other committee members spend the season traveling and talking to people within the college basketball world. All of those elements factor into the committee’s decision making process.

‘There has to be a human element involved,’ O’Connor said.

But the coaches don’t buy it. For many, there’s a lingering fear that when selection Sunday rolls around, a computer is playing too large of a role in deciding their school’s fate.

‘We’ve been told that the committee has been told not to concentrate on the RPI so much,’ Notre Dame head coach Mike Brey said in October. ‘But I know as we get down the stretch to Selection Sunday, there’s so much made of that I worry that they get browbeat a little bit.’

No matter how outspoken Big East coaches and officials may be, so is everyone else. O’Connor said conferences don’t exactly lobby to get into the tournament (‘That’s old school.’), every conference sends the committee literature and statistics to make the case for its member schools.

Still, at the end of the day, somebody will be left scratching their head.

‘It happens every year,’ O’Connor said. ‘Our charge is to pick the 34 best basketball teams in the country. And we do it by quantitative and qualitative analysis. At the end of the process every year there’s going to be someone who’s a little bit disgruntled because your team didn’t get in.’

kbaustin@syr.edu

Published on February 4, 2008 at 12:00 pm