fourthandshort
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jul 17, 2017
- Messages
- 9,751
Yes, generally true.Having watched the process for years...the magic number is 8 wins. As long as you're in a full scholarship league (not Pioneer, Northeast nor Patriot for example) and commit to sending your champion to the playoffs (not SWAC or MEAC), all of the 8 qualifying win teams generally are in the playoffs. 7-4 puts you on the fence, and only occasionally do the 6-5 teams get invited.
The Colonial has enough lower end teams, and enough teams overall, than they frequently have a group of 8 win teams.
But in the end, playoff records by conference are a strong performance indicator both of the teams coming out of certain conferences and of the selection committee's performance in picking at large teams. Some tend to think that MVFC gets enough teams .. our playoff record historically empirically proves we don't get enough. Our collective record excluding NDSU is well above .500 .. no other conference is close over the last 10-12 years. Only Big Sky is close over the last 4 years .. this year, they were deservedly the better conference. Colonial getting 5 bids was not justified .. they softened their OOC schedules and softened their conference with new weak teams and now have 13 conf teams. only playing 8 of 13 .. that's how they get to 8 wins.
Here we sit in quarterfinals with 3 of 5 Big Sky teams, 2 of 3 MVFC teams, and 1 of 5 Colonial teams .. W&M, who's cost of entry was a game against weak autobid Gardner Webb.
Big Sky's 2 losses were Weber St against #4 seed Mont St by 8 and Montana losing at 3 seed NDSU by 23.
MVFC's 1 loss was UND against 9-2 Weber St, who should have been a top 8 seed.
Colonial played a bunch of weak auto-bids from east coast and is still down to 1 team now. Only legit tough team they played was Elon losing at Home by 25 to Furman.