NCAA Tournament: Snub of Indiana as No. 1 Overall Seed Shows Regular Season Doesn't Matter

It’s weird to call a No. 1 seed a snub, but that’s what happened to the Indiana Hoosiers tonight. They won the outright Big Ten Conference title in dramatic fashion by beating the Michigan Wolverines exactly one week ago. Many coined them the No. 1 seed in the Midwest Region then with that victory.

The Midwest Region was so crucial for the Hoosiers to try and get since they would be playing literally an hour north in Indianapolis at Lucas Oil Stadium for the Regionals. Being close to home would be a huge home court advantage and allow them to have an easy road to the Final Four in Atlanta.

The selection committee showed their incompetence tonight in putting the Louisville Cardinals in Indianapolis and forcing the Hoosiers to go out East. What happened to the overall body of work? Why win the regular season conference title when the NCAA deems a team the No. 1 overall by getting hot at the end of the season.

The selection committee flat out lied to everyone when they said multiple times the last week that conference tournaments wouldn’t hurt a team as far as seeding goes since they will look over the whole body of the season.

If they took in effect the whole body of the season Indiana would be in the Midwest Regional not the East. The two schools would literally flip flop regions.

The first argument was Indiana won the outright title for the toughest conference in the nation. Louisville, on the other hand, could only tie, and the team that won the tiebreaker with Louisville was Georgetown, who Indiana beat by 10 points on a neutral court in a championship game this season.

So logic states that for that reason alone Indiana should be seeded over Louisville.

If not for that lets dig a little deeper.

Indiana is a perfect 5-0 against opponents that were ranked in the top 10 of the country when playing them. Louisville has yet to win a game against a top 10 ranked team as they were 0-2 this season. In fact, the best ranked team Louisville beat was ranked 12th.

Another reason for Hoosier fans to seem snubbed is going back to the body of work reasoning. Louisville fell out of the top 10 over a month ago and just got ranked higher than 10th this past week in the polls. Indiana, on the other hand, never fell further than seventh, and have zero losses to teams outside the top 50 in the RPI. The Cardinals have a loss to a team outside the top 50 and didn’t have the season Indiana had, nor faced the type of competition.

After all of those reasons, how was Louisville seeded over Indiana and awarded the Indianapolis region? The Hoosiers were actually better off not winning the regular season conference title and getting seeded No.2 in the Indy region.

The selection committee messed this up big time. You penalize a team for winning their conference outright, and only awarded Louisville due to a conference tournament that doesn’t mean anything.

Shame on those members. Now, they will get to sit back and enjoy 15,000-20,000 fans in a 50,000 seat venue where that stadium would have been filled to capacity and raucous. They made their own bed in this one.