NORFOLK, Va. – The mood was festive as the double decker Venture Tours bus left Hattiesburg, Mississippi at 11 a.m. Sunday morning.
The Old Dominion baseball team had won three of five games in the Conference USA Tournament, and lost to eventual champion Louisiana Tech by a run in the semifinals. The Monarchs won 41 games in the nation's fifth-best conference and finished strong, winning 10 of their last 12 games.
They were ranked 40th in the NCAA RPI.
Surely, as they departed Mississippi, the players and coaches felt they were a lock for an at-large NCAA Tournament bid. In so many ways, special assistant Tony Guzzo said, the record was nearly identical to last season, when ODU emerged as one of the nation's 16 No. 1 seeds.
But as upset after upset occurred in conference title games Sunday, and low-RPI teams such as Louisiana, UNC Greensboro, San Diego and Michigan claimed coveted automatic bids, it became clear the Monarchs were back on the bubble.
Coach Chris Finwood watched bits and pieces of the upsets on his cell phone and by the time the bus pulled into Norfolk at 4:30 a.m. on Monday, he acknowledged the NCAA selection show might be a tough pill to swallow.
It was. For the second time in five years, ODU was one of the first four teams out of the field. And that's maddening for so many reasons.
First, this team beat quality opponents. The Monarchs swept two games from No. 8 NCAA seed East Carolina, won two of three against No. 11 Southern Miss and won at Virginia, which was 24th in the RPI.
The Monarchs are second in the nation in home runs and given their phenomenal run last season, when they lost to Virginia 4-3 in 10 innings in an NCAA Regional, you'd think their reputation would, all things being equal, have given them a little edge with committee members.
They were 11-8 against Quad 1 and Quad 2 opponents, 16-4 on the road and 22-13 in Conference USA, which, I repeat, was the nation's fifth-best conference.
More on that later.
Finwood was disappointed but philosophical, saying "our guys did everything they possibly could. I don't know how much more they could have done.
"When you play in a league like Conference USA, the fifth best in the country, and you win 22 conference games and 41 overall and have some really good non-conference wins, it's hard when your name is on the first four out list.
"It's been excruciating for the guys. I'm keeping that in perspective. Nobody is living or dying today. But the guys put their hearts and souls into this and that makes it tough."
Athletic Director Dr. Wood Selig wasn't philosophical – he was devastated and a little angry.
"This is one of the most disappointing moments of my athletic career," said Selig, who has been an athletic director for 24 years.
"I know how deserving our student-athletes were and there's no legitimate way to honestly explain this.
"If anyone was watching ODU, if they know baseball, they have to know we're an NCAA team. Not many teams hit it better than we do. Not many teams field better than we do. We're always in the game. We're built for the NCAA."
Stats and metrics are one thing, but Selig has a great point there: the Monarchs passed the eye test.
This team was big, powerful and fast. No lead was ever save against the Monarchs, not with six guys all in double figures in home runs. There's not room in the box score for heart, and this team hustled and fought and won comeback game after comeback game.
And the Monarchs were fun to watch. Baseball is often pilloried as a dull game. There was nothing dull about a team that often belted game-winning home runs in the bottom of the last inning.
As for stats and metrics, you don't have to dig too deeply to know the selection committee has some explaining to do. Unfortunately, the ESPN crew which questioned the committee head on the selection show didn't ask about ODU, instead choosing to ruminate about why Notre Dame didn't host a regional.
How Grand Canyon warranted an at-large bid is beyond me. Grand Canyon lost in the Western Athletic Conference semifinals and was 25-5 in the nation's 19th-best league. Grand Canyon was 12-11 in Quad 1 and Quad 2 stories and ranked 50th in the RPI.
Let's face it, Grand Canyon plays in a low-level baseball league, and yet the committee chair said they warranted a bid because they played a "tough non-conference schedule."
Huh?
As D1 Baseball writer Aaron Fitt noted on Twitter: "The committee obviously fell in love with nonconference SOS (strength of schedule) And hey, that should be a part of the puzzle. But that's also harder to control than conference results, and I think conference performance should matter more in those power leagues."
And this season, Conference USA was a power league.
Arkansas and Ole Miss also received questionable bids. I realize the SEC is the nation's best league, but almost no prognosticators had Ole Miss penciled in on their predicted fields of 64.
Ole Miss lost in the SEC Tournament play-in game and had a losing SEC record. Arkansas was 3-7 in its last 10 games and was a spot below ODU in the RPI.
Conversely, others joined ODU as teams that should be playing this week and aren't.
North Carolina State, ranked 32nd nationally, fought its way to the ACC championship game but did not make the field. Neither did No. 37 UTSA, which was 19-15 against Quad 1 and Quad 2 teams, defeated Southern Miss twice on its home field in the C-USA Tournament and lost to Louisiana Tech in the championship game on a walk-off single Sunday afternoon.
Incredibly, UTSA wasn't even on the committee's list of the first four out.
Conference USA was ranked behind only the SEC and ACC (nine bids apiece) and the Big 12 and Pac-12 (five bids apiece) in the baseball RPI. Yet the league only received two bids.
The Sun Belt, ranked sixth nationally, got four bids.
"I scratched my head over that one," Selig said. "When is the last time fifth-best league only got the regular season champion and tournament champion in the field?"
This is just another reason why it's such a good thing that ODU is leaving C-USA for the Sun Belt. July 1 can't come soon enough.
C-USA commissioner Judy MacLeod and her entire staff should be hanging their heads in shame. When you have teams like UTSA and ODU on the bubble, you fight like hell to educate committee members as to just how good they are, even if very soon, they will be leaving your league.
I don't know what, if anything, the league did to lobby the NCAA Committee. Whatever was done, it didn't work.
The Sun Belt, meanwhile, looks better and better every day.
Georgia Southern is hosting a regional and Southern Miss, which joins the league next year, is also hosting a regional.
Louisiana, Coastal Carolina and Texas State are also in the tournament and ODU, Marshall and James Madison also join a league that will leapfrog well ahead of C-USA next season.
Dr. Selig declined to criticize C-USA officials, saying he prefers to look forward and not back.
But he added that he's going to be proactive in trying to prevent this from happening again.
"ODU baseball should now be a three-time NCAA tournament team in the last five years but for reasons I don't think anyone can honestly explain, we have gone only one time in the last five years," he said.
"I don't quite understand why we haven't gotten the recognition we have earned on the field. I feel like statistically, we've done everything we could have done. I don't know what the committee needs to see to justify our inclusion. I'm extremely disappointed and baffled."
He said he will reach out to committee members to find out where they think ODU was lacking.
"I was on the NCAA women's basketball committee for four years," he said. "I know the process, everything that goes into it. I know how challenging it is and know it's far from an exact science. I also know that second guessing comes with the territory.
"We need to figure out what we need to do differently, if anything. If they'll allow me to see the information, I'd like to know what was being discussed when we were compared with other teams. Where did we fall short?
"People don't understand how hard it is to play at this level and to finish where we have the last two years. We've witnessed and enjoyed some of the best baseball in the country the last two years. People don't appreciate how hard it is to sustain things at this level and that these kinds of opportunities don't come along very often.
"That's what makes what happened today so very difficult to handle. Teams like this don't come around all that often."
Finwood and his assistant coaches got the very best out of a team that suffered from injuries and just didn't quite have enough pitching to win the C-USA championship.
Former ODU assistant coach Karl Nonemaker, now at Auburn, sent Finwood a text that he shared with the media.
"He wrote, 'If the goal of a coach is to get a team to be fully invested in each other and the program and competing the best as they can, I watched all of the games yesterday, and man, you guys are the epitome of that,'" Finwood said.
"'I was really proud of the jobs you did, and the kids and the team.'"
"That's what I'd like to take away from this, a little bigger picture," Finwood added. "It hurts, without a doubt, but it hurts for the right reasons. It hurts because those guys love each other. We became a really, really good team.
"That's what you're after, that's what you're always fighting to try to grab ahold of, and those guys did it."
Sadly, when all is said and done, that will have to be enough.
Minium: Athletic Director Wood Selig Perplexed as to Why ODU Baseball Didn't Make NCAA Field
