I disagree with a lot of you guys here when it comes to where MTSU was seeded and I did a lot of resume comparisons, I DO agree with all of you who said the Gopher's should have been a 6 seed.
First of all, even if the only thing you looked at was the rpi, a #5 seed was sort of a generous seed. Maybe the committee gave UMn a lot of benefit of the doubt because of their impressive # of Top 50 and Top 100 wins, especially with their 5 Top 50 wins away from home, including 3 Top 50 ROAD games, 1 of those being a Top 25 wins. UMn also had an 8-7 record vs Teams in the field. And if those were the only factors you looked at, you could almost have justified giving the Gophers a #4 seed.
I think a lot of Gopher fans would be surprised to learn just how few teams out there had more Top 50 wins, and even fewer had more Top 50 wins away from home and even fewer had more Top 50 ROAD wins. I haven't checked since I made resume check of the Top 35 rpi teams in the country, which was when the Gophers had just 2 games left in conference play, but at that time only 7 teams in the entire country had more Top 50 wins, and only 6 had more Top 50 wins away from home and only ONE, had more Top 50 ROAD wins, and that was #1 ranked Villanova. Those resume features alone could have earned Minnesota a 4 seed if not a 3.
But those are all the positives, their were negatives such as the Gopher's 5 game losing streak, and PSU, our worst loss, dropping all the way out of the Top 100 in the last week of the season, giving us one bad loss, and the committee also considering other metric ratings like Ken-Pom, Sagarin, etc., and those metrics were not as nice to the Gophers as the rpi and so the 5 seed we got was probably an averaging out of our positives and our negatives.
Where I think the Committee got our seeding wrong is the loss of Springs. We were not a deep team with Springs, so losing him was a significant blow. This loss alone should have dropped us a full seed line, and I fully expected the SC to drop the Gophers down to a #6 and I was even prepared mentally to be ok with a #7 seed.
Now where I disagree most with some of you is your assessment of MTSU being so badly seeded. They only had 2 Top 50 wins and 4 Top 100 wins, and they had 3 Bad losses, including a loss to #222 UTEP, and TWO HOME BAD LOSSES. They played #338 FIU close in both their meetings, beating them both at home and away by only 3 points both games and they played a lot of teams rated in the 200s and 300s, and the SC has made it very VERY clear that they do not reward teams with weak SOS's and a lack of quality wins. There 2 Top 50 wins were also not clearly recognizable name schools, UNC-W and Vanderbilt. MTSU's best feature was their mid-30s RPI, but like UMn, other metric ratings were not as nice to MTSU.
Now just because I don't think MTSU should have been an 8/9 seed, doesn't mean that I agree with their getting a #12 seed. The other 8/9 seeds out there had better resumes than MTSU, but with 30 wins on the season and 2 Top 50 wins, they could have easily been given an #11 seed and maybe even a #10 seed.
So my final assessment is that their chances of getting a #10 seed, were about the same as our chances of getting dropped down to a #7 seed, and where I think they should have been placed was as an #11 seed, and I think the Gophers should have been placed as a #6 seed. And with the multiple connections between RP and MTSU and their coach, and the Gophers beating MTSU in the semi's of the NIT a few years back, I think it was simply destiny that Minnesota and MTSU met up in the Big Dance.
As for MTSU being the clearly better team, according to this goofball Chip? My first and only really significant question would be this, did MTSU shoot 53.8% from 3 point land during the season? And did UMn shoot only 28.5% from 3 point land during the season???
And it wasn't MTSU's defense that kept UMn from hitting more of their outside shots, they simply got good looks, and they simply missed. There was a point in the game where MTSU had made 6 of their first 10 three point shots, and UMn at that very same moment, had only made 3 of their first 15 three point shots. Add just one made 3 pointer to UMn and one fewer 3 pointers to MTSU and that's a 6 point swing and all of a sudden, late in the game, when Minnesota was starting to get MTSU into its own foul trouble, they wouldn't have felt compelled to shoot so many 3s, and could have kept driving the ball inside and forcing MTSU to either foul more or let the Gophers keep doing it. But MTSU DID have one of its best shooting efforts of their season and UMn had one of its worst and so the Gophers did opt for shooting 3s out of desperation to close the gap and without Springs in the lineup, no one got hot enough to close that gap.
I'd mention the foul trouble, except that an MTSU apologist could legitimately argue that Lynch struggling with foul trouble was a common thing, so it wouldn't be fair to include that as evidence of anything and that's ok. I don't think Lynch's foul trouble was the factor that lost the Gophers this game, because the Gophers won lots of games where Lynch had foul trouble. Was it A factor? Yes, but the factors that were NOT typical are what truly demonstrate MTSU was not simply the better team.
And that other NON-typical factor that really gave MTSU the edge in this contest, was Mason's having arguably the worst game of his entire season and it was clear that he was injured, the only mystery, to me, is whether it was something that bothered him the whole game and just got worse as the game wore on, or did something happen during the game to make it worse, or was he just playing poorly early in the game which was then made worse by getting injured? No matter what, his being healthy, even if it was only for the last portion of the game, was something the Gophers needed to go from coming up short in their comeback effort.
Not having Springs typically shouldn't have been enough to make MTSU a simply better team, but it was a factor that did make the teams closer. With Springs, I'd say UMn would win 5-6 games of a 7 game series, without Springs, I'd say closer to 4-5 games as long as they were tourney type games, meaning on a neutral court and with the same amount of game breaks.
OK, end of my novel, just wanted to get all of that off my chest, and can now hopefully move on and start focusing more on looking forward to next year than back on this past season.
