MORGANTOWN — For all sense of purpose, West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey and Attorney General John McCuskey have their hearts in the right place.
Their collective thinking just doesn’t really compute.
To keep it short, the state legislative duo, like all West Virginians, woke up Monday morning still fuming over the WVU men’s basketball team getting snubbed from the NCAA tournament.
Morrisey called on McCuskey’s office to open an investigation into the NCAA selection committee to determine if anything such as bribery or corruption played a role in the Mountaineers getting overlooked.
“We will get to the bottom of it,” Morrisey promised.
They called for a level playing field. They called for transparency. Simply put, they — as well as all college basketball coaches — want to know the exact formula the selection committee uses in saying one team can play while another can’t.
That’s all fine. If it eventually leads to athletic directors being taken off the selection committee, great. If it leads to the process being more public rather than behind closed doors, that’s a win.
And then McCuskey added something very interesting. To paraphrase, he reminded everyone the NCAA tournament is no longer some “fun little tournament.”
It’s big bucks now, but the selection-committee process has relatively remained the same.
“Sometimes processes need to evolve,” McCuskey said. “If we can use this scenario (WVU getting snubbed) as way to start to use some of these incredibly computer-generated models in some of the ways you can truly predict what a team’s season was and where they are using objective data, as opposed to the eye test, I think that’s better for everyone.”
And that’s where they hit a flat line.
College football had that “computer-generated” model from 1998 to 2013. It was called the BCS.
People hated it. The computers generated so much controversy because their numbers never took into account the human element of how teams won or lost games.
People hated it so much it led to bringing back actual people on a selection committee to use the “eye test” to pick who plays in the College Football Playoff.
Oh, how quickly we forget.
We want computers. No, we want the human element.
The results of this upcoming investigation can be summed up right now without writing a single letter or making a single inquiry to the NCAA: The sports world is imperfect.
Someone will be happy, while someone else will be ticked off, and that will never change no matter how transparent or computer-generated the process was to get there.
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OK, on the snub itself, we have to ask you to be as unbiased as possible on this one.
WVU had the metrics, the quality wins and played the 24th-toughest schedule in the country.
Those are facts.
But, for the last half of the regular season, the question is when could WVU fans truly stand up and say, “This team looks every bit like an NCAA tournament team?”
When the Mountaineers lost to lowly Arizona State at home? The loss to last-place Colorado in the Big 12 tournament?
WVU nearly lost a 22-point lead against UCF. It had to scratch and claw to sweep Utah. It split two games with a not-so-good TCU team.
This wasn’t exactly Showtime we witnessed over the last two months.
The argument also exists that WVU had to overcome so much adversity, which it did.
It overcame the loss of guard Tucker DeVries after eight games into the season and pulled off big wins against Kansas and Iowa State without him.
It began the season with an entirely new roster and a first-year coach.
So did Louisville. So did Michigan. WVU wasn’t exactly alone in that boat.
In the transfer portal era, basically everyone is starting each season from scratch, so I can’t put a lot of weight on that argument.
Bottom line, it hurts like hell today to not see the Mountaineers in the NCAA tournament. If we’re completely honest, though, we should also be able to understand why they’re not.
