Lorenzo Romar was asked Tuesday if he thought his Washington basketball team is capable of competing in the NCAA tournament.
“No doubt,” Romar said. “No doubt about it.”
Nobody who watched the Huskies’ second-half rally against Duke – they went toe to toe with the Blue Devils in New York before losing – can doubt the Huskies’ ability to advance beyond the first round.
The doubt is whether they will qualify for the first round.
A regular-season Pacific-12 Conference co-championship can be clinched Thursday against a junior varsity club wearing USC uniforms, and an outright regular-season title could be at stake Saturday at UCLA. Finishing in first place is usually an achievement. Finishing first in the 2011-12 version of the Pac-12 – the other dog pack – is, as title deeds go, sort of like owning property on Baltic Avenue.
The Huskies are guaranteed nothing if they don’t secure the automatic bid from the conference tournament. Check that. If they claim the regular-season championship before getting bounced from the Pac-12 tournament, they are guaranteed a selection-committee verdict that will be the talk of the nation March 11.
Should Washington make the cut in such a scenario, a TV studio analyst will point out how the Pac-12 – a league that is 1-29 versus the top 50 – is undeserving of a second representative.
Should Washington be denied the cut in such a scenario, a TV studio analyst will point out how no regular-season champion from a “power” conference has failed to score an at-large invitation tournament.
It’s also possible a compromise could be struck, and Washington goes to the tournament – sort of, in a way, but not really – as a “First Four” team required to travel to Dayton, Ohio, for a play-in game sandwiched between Selection Sunday and All Hell Breaks Loose Thursday.
What sort of team takes the Dayton Detour? A team such as Alabama-Birmingham, which a year ago provided the selection committee with a profile similar to this season’s Huskies.
UAB competed in Conference USA, then ranked 10th among Division I basketball conferences. (The Pac-12 currently ranks 10th.) UAB’s league record of 12-4 wasn’t as impressive as the 15-3 the Huskies could produce with a sweep of the Los Angeles schools, but the Blazers’ RPI (31) was better than Washington’s RPI (don’t ask, don’t tell). UAB was 10-7 versus the top 100; the Huskies likely will be 3-8.
When UAB was eliminated from its league tournament, the committee considered the Blazers’ on-the-fringe status. Hmm. What do you do with the regular-season champions of a mediocre conference? You seed them 12th, the committee concluded, and pair them with a Clemson team also seeded 12th, and you send them to Dayton.
Winning six tournament games necessary for the national championship is a Herculean task. Winning seven? Not even Hercules would be up to that bash. He’d put his hands in his pockets and mumble something about arthritis creeping up on him.
But Dayton does not have to be a death sentence. Play-in games are nationally televised on truTV, a Turner affiliate originally known as Court TV. (“Basketball Court TV” seems to me a better name for the network than truTV, but I digress.)
The games count in the record book as official NCAA tournament games, even though they’re NCAA tournament games only sort of, in a way, but not really.
Oh, and there’s this: Virginia Commonwealth accepted its First Four designation in 2011 and ran with it. The Rams, seeded 11th, beat USC at Dayton, then went on to take down Georgetown, Purdue, Florida State and Kansas en route to the unlikeliest Final Four berth in maybe, like, ever.
Last year, when the NCAA implemented its expansion of the tournament from 65 teams to 68, tournament purists raised objections: Adding three play-in teams affected the mathematical symmetry of office-pool brackets.
But there should be no grumbling about the First Four if Washington is the beneficiary of a lifeline. It might have to play in to play on, so play in.
This is all conjecture, of course. If NBA-bound freshman Tony Wroten and NBA-bound sophomore Terrence Ross attain harmonic convergence, and if NBA-bound junior Aziz N’Diaye endures the rigors of playing three games in three nights, the Huskies swoop through the Pac-12 tournament with the precision of Blue Angels pilots.
In that case, there’s no discussion, no debate, no Selection Sunday angst. The NCAA tournament turns from a tenuous hope to a reality posing more simple questions: Where will they go, and what opponents await when they arrive?
Don’t count on it.
This Huskies season has been a grind from the inception of training camp, when it was learned that senior guard Scott Suggs, ailing with a toe injury, would take a year off as a medical redshirt. Since then, nothing has been easy.
I see a team unable to follow through on its regular-season conference title with a Pac-12 tournament championship, and yet I see an NCAA tournament team with the talent to win more than once.
I see the Huskies landing in Dayton, home of the Wright Brothers.
Make of that what you will.
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