FORT WORTH – In a season already blemished with decimating injuries, sudden defections and, nay, 13 defeats, this was still the unkindest cut of all.
For the TCU basketball team, March Madness dissolved Sunday into March sadness. The Watch Party turned out to be a wake.
Later they would bare their feelings in a litany of heartache.
Shocked, they said. Disappointed.
“It’s kind of a joke on us,” said senior Alex Robinson.
Even before the CBS announcers came to the final half of the West region bracket unveiling, a few of the Frogs players had figured out the oncoming bracket-opsy and rose to their sneakered feet and left.
The supporters and season ticket holders that had been invited to help the Frogs celebrate a hoped-for NCAA bid quietly gathered their kids and left.
March sadness.
Coach Jamie Dixon, who seems at his best at times like these, when he’s had to announce another season-ending injury or assess another broadside absorbed midship, tried to put the feelings into words.
“We’re disappointed, obviously,” he said. “We saw the projections and pretty much everybody we saw had us in. So it looks like we’re the team that’s probably the most surprised in the country.
“That’s certainly not something that you want to be, but that’s where we’re at.”
Dixon was right. Scattered bracketologists had weighed TCU’s in-conference schedule and evaluated them as tournament-fit. Others, however, had them teetering on the 68-team field’s limbo, its infamous bubble.
“I’ve never really been in this situation, as far as looking at the projections and looking at all the different things where everybody seemed to have us in, so it is troubling when you see that,” Dixon said.
“You look at the NET, and there are six teams that have lower NETs than us. They created a tool, they talk about it, and then there’s six teams that are below us that are in. It’s disappointing.”
The NET, billed all season as the innovative defining algorithm for the tournament field, turned out to be a red herring. TCU’s final NET ranking was 52. St. John’s was 73, Arizona State 63, Seton Hall 57 – all but TCU were handed NCAA at-large bids.
Dixon couldn’t seem to get around the fact that so many sources he trusted had expected the Frogs would be invited.
“Everybody had us in, except those guys on the committee,” Dixon said.
In hindsight, certainly the Frogs’ non-conference schedule can be exposed as lacking heft. TCU collected pre-holiday wins over the likes of NET lightweights Oral Roberts (296), Charlotte (262), Cal State Bakersfield (218) and Indiana State (198).
That has to be remedied in future years, but coaches had little warning this season of the new criterium.
Not that it mattered.
Only six Big 12 teams made the tourney field. Eight teams from the allegedly mighty Big Ten were named. The ACC and SEC both had seven.
“Yeah, that’s crazy, man,” the Frogs’ Robinson said. “We have the most competitive conference in the country from top to bottom.”
Apparently, alas, the selection committee thought otherwise. Maybe it wrongly concluded that a down season for Kansas meant the entire Big 12 was below par.
“Clearly, [we have] the best conference in the country. I think if you look from top to bottom, certainly we didn’t have the No. 1 seeds, but when there’s wins throughout your conference that are a little easier to get, they seem to be valuing that,” Dixon said, indirectly referencing the teams from mid-major conferences that were handed bids.
“Our conference, we’ve said how tough it was. And I think you even saw at the end of the year the two teams at the bottom, West Virginia and Oklahoma State, were playing so well.”
Dixon concluded, “I don’t see how you can get [only] six from our conference.”
His team was winless in six games against the league’s highest NCAA seeds, Kansas, Texas Tech and Kansas State. Forgivable defeats, in normal seasons.
But there were ugly defeats at West Virginia and Oklahoma State, and two losses to Oklahoma, when a single victory over the Sooners might have been enough to get the Frogs into the NCAA.
Nobody was making excuses for those defeats Sunday. The Frogs seem to have accepted that this is part of their season’s story – the ambitious preseason expectations, the 12-1 start, Jaylen Fisher’s lineup-crippling injury and abrupt departure, the seven-man rotation they were left with, and on and on.
Dixon and his team haven’t whined. But they knew that an NCAA tournament reward at the end would have absolved a lot of the disappointment.
Instead, March sadness.
To longtime TCU basketball observers, the seat on the NCAA bubble was an unfamiliar one in itself. The Frogs were attempting to make the tourney field in consecutive seasons for the first time in more than 60 years.
Even the idea of considering an NIT bid a disappointment seems a foreign one.
“I come in with a little bit different philosophy, so I understand where that comes from,” Dixon said. “I know this is not normal to Fort Worth and TCU.
“But we had talked about the team getting to the tournament two years in a row, and everybody had put us in there. I get that aspect of it. But at the same time, when you see all these projections, it makes you wonder why and how, and we certainly seem to be the team that is left out.
“I guess there’s some little part of me that says, you know, we’ve made significant progress, but this time I’m really disappointed to not be in the tournament.”
The watch party, as it turned out, hadn’t been much of a party at all.
As the groans and the arrghs filled the room Sunday, the Frogs players rose and left, headed to their locker room.
They had a practice scheduled. And there was a disappointment to be stashed on top of the season’s other ills.
They should know the drill by now.
(Title photo by Melissa Triebwasser)
