Miami of Ohio went 31-0 in the regular season. A bad MAC tournament loss makes for an uncomfortable Selection Sunday
Then-Valparaiso head coach Bryce Drew instructs his team during a game in 2016.
(CNN) — Steve Prohm lets out a deep exhale and Bryce Drew sighs an extended, “Oohhhh.’’ Josh Schertz kind of tsk-tsks, before muttering, “It’s a tough one.’’
Independent of one another, each has been asked the same question: “What does it feel like to be Travis Steele this week?”
They have all been Steele, or at least some iteration of him. The Miami (Ohio) coach should be sitting in the catbird seat. After surviving a dizzyingly chaotic regular-season finale at Ohio University that included two technical fouls and one flagrant on Miami, his RedHawks completed a perfect 31-0 regular season, the first to do so since Gonzaga in 2021 and only the eighth in the last 50 years.
Except this is Miami with that pesky attachment to its name – Ohio. Were this the Miami of U fame in Coral Gables, Florida, copious amounts of words would have been spewed about the team’s awesomeness and this week – conference tournament week – would be nothing more than a stop gap between the regular season and an inevitable bid to go dancing in the NCAA Tournament.
In the Ohio version of this tale, the RedHawks are at best a lightning rod, at worst an annoyance and now perhaps a little uncomfortable as it awaits Selection Sunday. After teetering on the brink of losing for weeks, Miami finally succumbed. The RedHawks lost in the first round of the MAC Tournament to a UMass team that had dropped six of its last seven regular-season games and owns a tanking NET ranking of 204.
It is not just a bad loss; it is a really badly timed one. While one loss shouldn’t erase 31 victories, it gives the Selection Committee an out if it wants to take it.
Cinderella is a funny girl when her glass slippers are Nike issued. We are amused by her as a lead-up to the ball and love her if she earns a party-crashing admittance and then goes on to trash the place in the first weekend. But not everyone is so eager to hand our protagonist one of the coveted 37 extra tickets held in reserve.
For every person who believes that Miami deserves a bid to the NCAA Tournament regardless of what happens this week in Cleveland, there is a counterprogrammer who argues that the RedHawks’ weak schedule means they should be tossed for a power conference member.
The mid-major versus high major value is hardly new. The reason Prohm, Drew and Schertz can relate is because they all had their spin through this particular blender: Prohm twice while at Murray State, Drew while he was at Valparaiso and Schertz with Indiana State. The interesting twist on Miami’s case is their test balloon is being floated as the powers-that-be debate expanding the NCAA Tournament field.
In theory – theory – that should offer more opportunities for the future Miamis of Ohio.
But those who live in the real world of college athletics question if that will be the case.
“The system is not designed to be equitable,” Schertz told CNN Sports, who is now the head coach at Saint Louis. “And if you’re a Power 5 team, you don’t want it to be. Bids mean money and everyone wants more money. Expansion, if we go to say eight more, I think it means maybe one mid-major bid or two. The allure of the tournament is Cinderella, this team you never heard of suddenly winning games. It’s not the 13th team in the Big Ten playing the 14th team in SEC, but that’s what we’ll get.”
The pressure of perfection, even among mid-majors
The plight for the mid-major has never been easy.
Despite a phonebook of NCAA rules designed to create an even playing field, it never has been. With the advent of NIL and revenue sharing, not to mention a transfer portal that pickpockets good players, it’s even harder.
That Miami was able to build on a 25-win season a year ago, retain the better part of its roster and up its record to 31-0 is in and of itself worthy of something.
The question is if it’s worth an NCAA bid. Since the tournament expanded in 1985, no team with two or fewer losses has been left out of the bracket. That’s 2,616-0 for those keeping score at home.
“You should reward excellence,” Prohm says. “I don’t care about Quad 1 games or any of that. To go out and win all of your games, to have your team focused and ready to play every single night, there’s a reason so few teams have done it and that excellence deserves to be rewarded.”
In sports, where hard stats create black-and-white lines, no one has a whole lot of time for nuance. Those in the “no Miami” camp point to a schedule that includes not a single Quad 1 team and 26 from Quads 3 and 4. What they don’t see is the reality behind those numbers – the road games, the scheduling headaches, and frankly, the pressure.
The NCAA uses a combination of metrics – Ken Pomeroy, Torvik and BPI – to assess how good a team is beyond just their record. Teams are then grouped by quad – Quad 1 teams are the best in the country, on down. More weight is given to wins against better teams and weighted even more if the game is on the road.
In 2012, Prohm’s first at Murray State, the Racers opened their season on November 14 with a win against Morgan State and continued to pile up nothing but victories all the way through February. In win number seven, the Racers knocked down Southern Miss in two overtimes, and in win No. 10 upset 21st-ranked Memphis at the FedExForum. They erased SIU-Edwardsville with ease for their 20th victory.
Along the way, the national media, whose knowledge of Kentucky basketball typically began in Lexington and ended in Louisville, found their way to tiny Murray, winding their way down Highway 641. They popped into Sammons’ Bakery or stopped in Nick’s, the local sports bar, to get the temperature of a place making college basketball history.
On the road, ordinary gyms suddenly felt like coliseums. At SIU Edwardsville in January for game number 20, 4,157 people crammed into the Sam M. Vadalabene Center – the second-most in the building’s history – for a game televised by ESPNU. At the Cougars’ next home game, 1,158 showed up to watch Morehead State.
“You get to 17-0, 19-0 and suddenly everyone is paying attention to you,” Prohm says. “I don’t care where you go. Everyone wants to knock you off. I think anyone can appreciate how amazing and how stressful that is.”
Murray’s run at perfection that year ended in game No. 24. A guy by the name of Robert Covington – who would go on to play 10 years in the NBA – dropped 17 and Tennessee State pulled off the upset, but the Racers won the OVC Tournament and never had to sweat out a tourney bid.
‘The most stressful three days of your life’
That wasn’t the case for either Drew or Schertz.
In 2016, Valparaiso finished the regular season 26-5 overall and 16-2 in the Horizon League. Along the way they beat Oregon State and lost by just six on the road to Oregon. Both the Beavers and the Ducks later would make the field – as No. 7 and No. 1 seeds, respectively.
But the Beacons also lost twice to Wright State during the regular season and to Ball State in the non-conference schedule, which put them solidly on the bubble. Playing without regular starter Tevonn Walker, who injured his ankle the game before, Valpo lost to Green Bay in overtime in the semifinals of the Horizon League Tournament.
That loss combined with the bad in-season Ls outweighed the solid results they put up in the Pacific Northwest.
“In a one-bid league, to be a coach, that is the most stressful three days of your life,” Drew told CNN Sports. “All it takes is one bad stretch or a couple of bad plays and it doesn’t matter if you’re 16-0 or 18-2, it’s all over. That’s it. It’s over.”
There is a tendency at this time of the year to blind-resume compare – to throw up two schools with all their metrics and argue who does and doesn’t belong in the tournament.
“They’re not the same,” Schertz said. “At the mid-major, every loss is looked at as a bad loss. At the high major, you’re playing with house money. If you win, it’s a great win. If you lose, well that’s OK, too. If we lose to someone in the bottom of the Atlantic 10, it would be, ‘H no.’ There is incredible pressure at the mid-major level to not lose. Incredible pressure.”
In 2024, Schertz made the unforgivable mistake of losing at exactly the wrong time. His charming Indiana State team – led by the bespectacled and beloved cult hero Robbie Avila, better known as Cream Abdul-Jabbar – won 28 games in the regular-season, and the Missouri Valley crown.
But in the Valley tourney title game, Indiana State couldn’t come all the way back from an 18-point hole, losing the game and the automatic bid to Drake. The Sycamores’ lack of a signature win – they lost at Alabama and Michigan State – along with a few bad regular-season losses and a wild bid-stealing postseason loss left them on the outside looking in.
“We were the last four in, the first four out, the next four out; it was exhausting,” Schertz said. “You’re just sitting there watching the results, knowing there is nothing you can do.”
What else schools can do
Critics crow that there is, in fact, more mid-majors can do by bumping up their schedules.
Prohm, who spent six seasons at Iowa State running through the gauntlet that is the Big 12, will be the first to admit his challenges at Murray State were not the same he faced with the Cyclones. That doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.
At Iowa State, he had opportunity – to get big wins in league, to schedule equal opponents in the non-conference schedule and to play in multi-team exempt tournaments that offered up a cornucopia of chances. Those weren’t offered while he was at Murray.
“We’d beg and plead with ESPN to let us in the MTEs,” he said.
Similarly, a published report showed just who Miami did try to schedule this year – Pitt, Marquette and Wisconsin. No one bit.
“There have been a lot of talk about Miami already on the committee,” said NCAA vice president for basketball Dan Gavitt, who sits in with the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee as it deliberates the bracket. “But they also know they don’t get the return phone calls.”
The combination of conference expansion and the nitty-gritty methodology behind the NET Rankings don’t bode well for that changing anytime soon.
Bloated leagues mean there is less wiggle room for non-conference games and the way the NET is weighted – teams are rewarded for quality of opponent, with extra weight on road and neutral games, as well as points per possession – means that it makes no sense to schedule a home game against a good Quad 2 team that you might not beat by enough points.
“Unless they know we’re going to be a Quad 1, they’re not playing us,” Schertz said. “It makes more sense to play each other. Every win will be a great win, and every loss isn’t so bad.”
All of which leads full circle back to Cleveland, where Miami just conceded the one thing no one else could take away: Control of its own destiny.
“You know, all I can say is control what you can control,” Drew said. “That’s my advice. Our team, Indiana State, there was nothing we could do once we lost, and it’s an awful feeling. There’s no question in my mind that Miami belongs in the tournament. But I thought we did, too.”
The-CNN-Wire
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