In a miracle upon miracles, the University of Arizona punched their ticket to the NCAA tournament to face West Virginia in the first round.  Yet, the real story is how on earth did the UA accomplish this task.  Well lets look at some numbers and make sense of this.  First lets look at the records for UA and ASU.

UA – 19-14 overall and 8-10 in the PAC-10.  Str of Schedule: 2, RPI: 38

ASU –  19-12 overall and 9-9 in the PAC-10.  Str of Schedule: 77, RPI: 83. And oh by the way, they swept the Cats. 

 How do the signature wins stack up? For this analysis we will look at teams that made it into the NCAA bracket.  ASU has wins over Xavier (3 seed), Oregon (9 seed), Stanford (3 seed), and UA (10 seed) twice.

On the other hand, UA beat Texas A&M (9 seed), UNLV (8 seed), USC (6 seed), and Washington State (4 seed) twice.

Ok, from looking at those numbers ASU has 5 wins over tournament teams, and the UA also has 5 wins over tournament teams.  In terms of seeds ASU’s opponents were 3,3,9,10,10 (total of 35).  Yet, UA has 4,4,6,8,9 (total 31).  Since these two teams have the exact same number of wins over tournament opponents we can add up the seeds of the people they beat and see which team beat a tougher group of opponents.  The lower the number the better.  What we see is UA’s duet of wins over Washington State and their victory against USC are key.  ASU has great wins over Xavier and Oregon, but after that they have nothing, solely because beating Arizona isn’t worth much.  Add in that UA has close loses to Kansas and Memphis and it pushes UA on to the dance floor.

 When I initially started writing this article I was going to blast the NCAA selection commitee for picking UA over ASU, how could they do that!? ASU swept UA! ASU has a better same-conference record.  Yes, both are true, but UA beat better teams than ASU did.  UA also had a similar over-all record (19-14 vs 19-12) versus significantly harder competition! 

Think about this, it’ll make ASU fans sick: The ugliest part of this whole debate is that because the Wildcats are so mediocre, ASU’s two victories over them carry little weight.  If the University of Arizona was just a little bit better, then ASU would actually make the tournament because their sweep of their in-state rivals would mean a whole lot more.

 In effect, ASU got left out of the tournament because UA sucks just enough so that ASU’s victories mean nothing, but UA’s strength of schedule was so good, tie it in with a couple key wins, and a couple close losses to high seeds and their just mediocre enough to slip in, but not good enough to give ASU two signature victories.  The dilemma the selection committee faced in this situation is that they have to look at the whole body of work.  UA’s whole body of work is stronger than ASU’s.  In my opinion, neither team was good enough to get in.  Other major snubs like Dayton, or Virginia Tech should have gotten UA’s spot, but oh well, I guess this is what happens when you have a team loaded with underperforming McDonald’s All-Americans and were a national championship team 11 years ago.