The NCAA Tournament Selection Committee Gives UVA a Pass

The Austro-Hungarian Empire is remembered for what? Possibly being one of the largest European empires at the time, right behind the Russian Empire. Of course it was also a dominant economic powerhouse in that they were the world’s fourth largest machine building nation. Although this ethnically diverse and as a result, unorganized bureaucratic state, has these vast accomplishments it seems to be most famous for its epic, and almost too simplistic, implosion and subsequent triggering of an epic worldwide slaughter called, World War I. The Austro-Hungarian Empire’s only goal in the war was to punish Serbia for assassinating its emperor’s heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Instead the empire’s ethnic divisions unraveled, and by 1916 an empire that once portrayed itself as a global force was realized to be a nothing more than a paper tiger. The surprise wasn’t’ that this great nation collapsed, it was the fact that the empire was able to conceal its blemishes so well for so long.

The University of Virginia men’s basketball team is the NCAA’s Austro-Hungarian Empire. It’s easy to see why they routinely are ranked so high in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. According to Kenpom.com, a college basketball statistics database, since 2014 Virginia has ranked in the top 12 for teams with the highest adjusted efficiency metric (adjEM), a statistic used to determine a team’s overall skill. Then again, since 2014 Virginia has been ranked no lower than a fifth seed in the NCAA Tournament and has finished no lower than 5^th in the notoriously brutal Atlantic Coast Conference. In other words, logic says that Virginia deserves to be ranked favorably.

Tony Bennett, Virginia’s head men’s basketball coach, has been able to excel at dominating the regular season. Though, when it comes to tournament play he has failed to capitalize on favorable rankings – only winning his conference tournament once since 2014. The year he won his conference tournament he also won the conference “regular season title” in 2018. That same year Bennett and his team would make NCAA history for all the wrong reasons. The first seeded Virginia Cavaliers would be ousted by the 16^th ranked (lowest seed in the tournament) UMBC. A 16^th seed defeating a one seed was so remarkable that there is a Wikipedia page dedicated to just that first round game. To say that Bennett and his team busted America’s brackets is an understatement. According to ESPN, of the 17.3 million brackets submitted in its Tournament Challenge, only 579,666 picked UMBC to win. That comes to a mere 3.5% percent of people picking UMBC to win the game; whereas 18% of entries had Virginia winning the entire tournament (including your correspondent).

There is reason to believe that this epic and complete debacle of a beautiful season should not transfer over to the subsequent year. It is of course a “new season,” with new meaning and a chance for a team to rewrite, make new, or, in the case of Virginia, bury past history. It doesn’t appear that this mantra holds truth, though. Yes, Virginia has done very well this year (excluding it being outplayed, outhustled, and frankly outmanned against Florida State in the ACC tournament), but there is reason to suggest where some teams are provided with a premium for past successful NCAA tournament performance, no team is punished. To illustrate this theory, it is important to note the premium that Villanova, the defending National Champion, has received from the NCAA Selection Committee in this year’s tournament. Deadspins’ Lauren Theisen describes it best: “The [Villanova} Wildcats might well be overrated by the committee; two national championships in three years will tend to skew perspective a bit.” It seems that arbitrary premiums are placed on teams who have a history of success, yet, a history of debacles and disappointments, like Virginia, do not depreciate a team’s subsequent seasons. If history is the best indicator of the future, then it should not be ignored simply because it may shed a bad light on a certain person, place or even sports team.

Virginia has so far done everything that it has always done – submitted an impressive regular season resume to the NCAA committee. They did the same thing the previous year and years prior- yet have little to show for it.  These impressive resumes are immensely overshadowed by its 2018 history making loss. That loss was the equivalent to when Austro-Hungary’s Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated. Virginia and Austro-Hungary, no matter how brilliant their histories may have appeared, have engrained their most memorable moment in history with their most embarrassing. It is their most embarrassing moment, not because of the loss to UMBC in Virginia’s case or the assassination in Austria’s, but because each event revealed what each truly was – a hollow, paper tiger.