MORAGA — A leaked bracket produced an early delivery to Saint Mary’s disappointment Sunday.
The Gaels were left out of the NCAA tournament when the bracket was unveiled, with their 27-5 record and West Coast Conference regular season co-championship good enough only for a trip to the NIT.
Saint Mary’s coach Randy Bennett’s biggest saving grace may have been that he didn’t have to suffer through CBS’s entire two-hour television show to learn the bad news.
A leaked bracket hit the Internet about 25 minutes after the selection show began and proved to be accurate. Bennett got word of it while the third of four regions was being unveiled, and he accepted that as the truth.
“We knew then,” he said. “You’re not going to phony that up.”
His players held out at least a little hope until the final brackets were released.
“I heard (about) the leaked bracket, and we weren’t in it,” junior guard Joe Rahon said. “I didn’t look at the bracket. I didn’t want to know. I was just hoping it was not real. One of those things, some spoof that someone put out there trying to get some views or whatever.”
That wasn’t the case, and Saint Mary’s is instead preparing for its third straight trip to the NIT. The Gaels are a No. 2 seed and will host New Mexico State (23-10) on Tuesday at 8 p.m. ESPN2 will televise.
“Obviously pretty shattered,” sophomore guard Emmett Naar said of the initial reaction. “We feel we had a great year this year. We knew we were on the bubble there and could’ve gone either way, but to not make it after what we thought was such a good year is obviously really disappointing. But the NIT is a great tournament. We’re looking forward. We’re happy to be playing at least at this stage of the year.”
This is the fifth NIT appearance in Bennett’s 15-year tenure, matching the amount of NCAA bids. Saint Mary’s hasn’t reached the Big Dance, though, since 2013.
“I told the team, ‘If you’re playing in a tournament that starts with an N, you had a good team. You had a good year,’ ” Bennett said. “The teams you play in the NIT are teams just like us that could’ve easily been in the NCAA tournament and didn’t get the nod.
“The NIT’s a really good tournament. We’re excited to be in it. These guys will get through this. Right now, I think, they’ve got a little hangover just from being left out. We’ll get in the right place real quick here.”
Since 2005, when the NCAA started using the current RPI formula, the Gaels are the 20th team with 25 or more wins to not make the field. The most is 27, which Drexel and Oral Roberts had in 2012. (For tournament consideration, Saint Mary’s has 26 wins because its victory over Division II San Francisco State doesn’t count.)
The last four at-large spots went to Vanderbilt, Wichita State, Michigan and Tulsa, with those teams all meeting in First Four games in Dayton, Ohio. The Gaels weren’t even among the first four teams left out, with St. Bonaventure, South Carolina, Monmouth and Valparaiso earning that distinction.
Costing the Gaels was a schedule strength ranked 199th nationally by KenPom.com and featuring 18 games against teams with an RPI above 200. According to CBS Sports, a team had not earned an at-large bid since 1994 while playing a schedule with more than half of its opponents ranked so low.
But Bennett, citing his team’s strong RPI of 37 despite playing in a weaker conference, defended the scheduling.
“We played good teams,” Bennett said. “Bakersfield ended up being good. Grand Canyon ended up being good. Cal, Stanford, Irvine. (UC) Davis won 25 games last year, that’s a good game to schedule. Cal Poly SLO is a good game to schedule. I thought we had a really good nonconference schedule, and we went 10-1. I don’t know. I really don’t know. If you had asked me at the beginning of the season, I would’ve said, ‘Hey, that’s a pretty good schedule.’ “
What hurt the Gaels, though, is that UC Davis went just 11-19 this year with an RPI of 281, and Cal Poly was 10-20 with a 235 RPI. Saint Mary’s also faced other low-RPI teams in Manhattan (227), Southern Utah (335) and Utah Valley (272), and its Stanford win wasn’t much of a boost thanks to the Cardinal’s 15-15 campaign.
Bennett said he hopes to get feedback to find out what his team needs to do to improve its NCAA chances in the future.
“We try to be intentional in everything we do, so if there’s a way we need to approach scheduling or something different, then we will,” he said.
Follow Jimmy Durkin on Twitter at Twitter.com/Jimmy_Durkin.
