West Coast Bias?

Did NCAA Selection Committee Snub Big West Baseball?

The outcry was almost immediate. On Memorial Day, the NCAA revealed the sixty-four team field for the 2023 NCAA Baseball Championship, and UC Irvine wasn't included. The Big West, which had been ranked the 10^th best conference in the nation, according to Warren Nolan, only received one bid to the annual tournament that culminates in Omaha. College Basketball calls their event “The Dance.” I prefer to call the baseball event, with all apologies to Cook E. Jarr, “The Party.”

Auburn AD John Cohen, who heads the NCAA Baseball Selection committee stepped to the camera and said that while Irvine had done everything right, they'd still be left out of the field. The Anteaters ended up 19-11 in the league, and 8-1 against the Pac-12. It was a bizarre explanation, that wasn't really an explanation. In the end, he added insult to injury, but not even getting the name of the school correct. (Full disclosure, hold an undergraduate degree from the institution in question.)

VIDEO COURTESY ESPN

The committee relied heavily on RPI as a criteria, and UC Irvine was just outside the field. No at-large team with an RPI higher than 47 was included. Seven of nine analysts from respected College Baseball publication D1Baseball.com, included Irvine among its capsules as the “team that got snubbed.”

Respected college baseball analyst Mike Rooney, also broke down flaws of the RPI, in comparing another Big West team's resume (UC Santa Barbara), with that of NC State.

VIDEO COURTESY ESPN

Now, to be fair, even Cohen admitted that RPI is a flawed metric, and needed to be re-examined, as did many others. College Basketball did this when they transitioned to the NET metric, with regard to evaluating teams for inclusion in their NCAA Championship Event.

Flawed or not, the RPI was the metric, so let's take a closer look. Georgia (42), Louisville (43), Kent State (46) and Virgina Tech (48) were also left out, along with UC Irvine (49). Arizona (45) and Louisiana (47) were the last two at-large teams in the field.

GRAPHIC COURTESY EPSN

Kent State lost their bid to Ball State, who won the MAC Tournament, while Georgia would have been 11^th SEC Team in the field. Louisville (42) and Va Tech (48) finished behind eight ACC squads that made the final sixty-four. Charlotte (C-USA) ranked at 67 and Tulane (American) at 157 both claimed auto-bids, by winning their conference tournaments, pushing UC Irvine further down the list, when it came to consideration.

Per Warren Nolan's site, this is how the conference RPI ranks broke out:

1. SEC

2. ACC

3. Big 12

4. Pac-12

5. Sun Belt

6. Big Ten

7. Colonial

8. C-USA

9. American

10. Big West

GRAPHIC COURTESY NCAA.COM

The Big West was the only league in the Top 10 that didn't receive multiple bids. The Big East, ranked 12^th, got two, with Xavier (44) winning the auto-bid, in the conference tournament. One of the issues for the Big West, is that they don't have a tournament, which should be rectified in 2025. Would that have mattered this year?

Among mid-major schools to get at-large bids, all posted RPI of 47 or better.

1. Coastal Carolina (14) Sun Belt

2. Dallas Baptist (16) C-USA

3. U Conn (24) Big East

4. East Carolina (26) American

5. Northeastern (31) Colonial

6. Troy (38) Sun Belt

7. Louisiana (47) Sun Belt

One of the issues with RPI is it heavily weights wins against Top 50 teams. UC Irvine ended up 0-1 against the Top 50 when all was said and done. That 0-1 record, however, does not take into account that the wins UC Irvine had against teams who were in the Top 50 at the time they played them. That 0-1 is based on where the teams were ranked at the end of the season. Wins against teams like UC Santa Barbara, Arizona State, and mid-week wins against Pac-12 opponents like UCLA and USC lost their zing as those teams dropped in the rankings. Irvine's 8-1 record against the Pac-12 ended up not being as impressive as it seemed.

Okay, so RPI giveth and RPI taketh away. But how consistently was that enforced? One glaring example was in choosing the regional hosts, where Campbell finished six spots ahead of Auburn in the rankings, yet it was the Tigers (where John Cohen is coincidentally Athletic Director) that got to host over the Camels. If the RPI was the metric used, flawed or not, why is a team that's six slots better not able to host? Cohen made a big point on the show about how when the Tigers’ situation was considered, he had to leave the room. To quote my one-time colleague at KABC Eyewitness News, Harold Greene, “Yeah, Right.” Or as the Bard himself might have said, “Thou dost protest too much.”

Whether or not Cohen was or wasn’t in the room, his influence clearly played a part in this decision. It's also no coincidence that the last time the Big West had a representative on the Selection Committee in 2014, they got four teams in the field.

Okay, so back to the matter at hand, did UC Irvine really get snubbed? I absolutely believe the Big West should have gotten two teams. For most of the season, it looked as if it could be a three-bid league, but late season swoons by both Cal State Fullerton and UC Santa Barbara muddled those plans. The Titans bounced back, securing the auto-bid, by the margin of an extra inning win over CSUN on April 30, as the outright champions, the UC San Diego Tritons, were ineligible for the post season, due to still being in the process of their transition from D2 to D1.

Let's look at the numbers, though. Kent State was also left out, with a 46 RPI, after Ball State won the MAC Tournament, beating the Golden Flashes twice. Louisiana got in with a 47 RPI, as the Sun Belt got four teams into the field, with the best Conference RPI of any league outside of the so-called Power Five.

In the end, it may boil down to the Anteaters' match-up with Arizona on May 15^th, a quick turnaround after a series loss on the road, at CSUN. The Wildcats put up three runs in the 7^th and 8^th, against the Irvine bullpen, to rally for a 4-3 win. Arizona finished with a 45 RPI, and just got into the field, ahead of the Eaters, a little bit of turnabout from 2014, where UC Irvine was the last team in the field, by virtue of two mid-week wins, over USC. The Anteaters went on a run to Omaha from Corvallis, through a Super Regional against Oklahoma State, in Stillwater.

So, while you can call into question the reliance on RPI, and the consistency of it's enforcement, the factors that likely led to UC Irvine being excluded from this year's field boiled down to the late loss to Arizona, and two outliers in Charlotte and Tulane, claiming their respective auto-bids.

Perhaps, in future years, the RPI can be re-evaluated, particularly in how it effects West Coast teams, and the Big West can build on their 2023 success, where seven of its teams were ranked in the Top 90 of RPI. An adjusted metric could bump the Big West to seventh or eighth among conferences, helping lower-tier Big West teams, to not be such a drag on the teams ahead of them in the standings.

2024 marks twenty years since the last Big West team won it all, as George Horton's Titans, captured the school’s fourth crown, in 2004. The Titans, Anteaters and Gauchos have all made it to Omaha since, and the Dirtbags have played in two Super Regionals. If the Tritons can grow into to a force, the Gauchos, Dirtbags and Titans revert to form, and teams like CSUN and Hawaii continue to ascend, the conference could repeat their run of 2014-2017, when they sent a team to Omaha for four straight years. As the old Lotto Commercials used to tell us, however, you have to be in it to win it. For now, that distinction belong to the Titans. Enjoy the game, folks.