Who cares that Notre Dame isn't dancing?

As I mentioned in my last entry, I love March Madness. By this time tomorrow, I will be fully doused in college hoops - watching the games, checking out my picks, watching in agony as one of my Final Four teams goes down in the first round, cheering on my favorite team (Duke, by the way), and everything else comes with it. I enjoy all the speculation and build up to the tournament, but ultimately it's all about the games.

What I do not enjoy is this period immediately following the bracket announcements, where every pundit weighs in on which mediocre teams got "snubbed", how Team A was more deserving than Team B, and so on and so forth. Dick Vitale, in particular, went on and on about how Notre Dame belonged in the tournament. He was joined by many others.

But really, let's look at this team that everyone was so convinced should be playing for the national championship. When Selection Sunday rolled around, Notre Dame sat with a 17-11 record, and were 9-7, good for 6th place in the Big East. They had lost 4 of their last 5 games, including being dumped in the first game they played in the Big East tournament. So, to recap, 11 loses, 7 conference losses, no wins in the conference tournament. And further more, this team that everyone was so high on, promptly went out 2 days later and lost in the first round of the NIT.

And so I ask: Who cares that Notre Dame isn't dancing? I exclude from this question the Notre Dame team and their fans. So they played a tough schedule. They lost 11 of the games. So they played in what was probably the toughest conference in the country this year. They finished 6th. Why should I cry because they, and many other teams with similar resumes, don't get to play for the national championship?

Yes, I understand that there are 65 bids available, and thus perhaps it is a fair discussion whether Notre Dame or someone else was more deserving of a bid than a team that received one. However, my bottom line is this: If you lost 11 games and were the 6th place team in your own conference, you aren't the best team in the nation, and so it's not going to keep me up nights that you didn't get to play for the national championship. Maybe you do have the ability to get hot and win the 6 games required to win the title, or to win fewer but still make a nice run. If you haven't done enough with your regular season schedule to at least rank you in the discussion for best team in your conference, then you haven't earned the right to take a shot at the national picture. Maybe you were more deserving than another team, but in my mind, you have no real room for complaint.

The teams that I feel bad for in the current system are teams from the smaller conferences who win their conference regular season, often handily, but fall prey to the upset in the conference tournament and thus don't get to dance because their conference is only going to get one bid. I'd much rather be spending at-large bids on teams like that (Miami of Ohio comes most prominently to mind), than on the Notre Dames of the basketball world.