At least they're in
Boston College fans are feeling, well, blue.
Their Eagles got the shaft, they're saying - getting a four seed in the Minneapolis bracket with their 26-7 record that included two wins over North Carolina, which earned a three seed in the D.C. regional with its 22-7 record and, ahem, the aforementioned two losses to Boston College.
But that's just the first gripe.
The second has to do with the fact that BC has to play on Thursday - in Salt Lake City, Utah - after playing in the ACC title game on Sunday.
Craig Littlepage, the athletics director at the University of Virginia and the chair of the NCAA tournament selection committee, was asked on a conference call Sunday night why Boston College wasn't placed in a Friday game.
"At the time that we were putting the field together, unfortunately, we're not always able to take that into consideration to be able to place a team that played on Sunday by virtue of its conference's decision to play its championship game on Sunday," answered Littlepage, curiously, given that Virginia is a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference, which long ago made the decision to play its championship game on a Sunday.
"When we look at our policies and procedures, and we're going through that S curve, and it's about 3:30 p.m., and we know that we're up against a deadline, we're doing the very best job that we can to seed this field, to bracket it, to make sure that we're taking in consideration all of the policies and procedures," Littlepage said.
"Unfortunately, we don't look at it in terms of whether teams that played on Sunday should be moved automatically to Friday/Sunday. Maybe that's something that we could look at in the future, but it wasn't a part of our deliberations this weekend or in weekends in the past," Littlepage said.
OK, one down.
As to the seeding issue ...
"We looked at North Carolina and its comparison to a number of schools - and not North Carolina versus Boston College," Littlepage said. "Many times when people have issues or have questions, they like to frame it in terms of either-or. This is not a zero-sum game that we do in the course of our deliberations.
"When we looked at Carolina, yes, we looked at the strong finish to the regular season. We also looked at the strong nonconference resume that they put together - not specifically compared to Boston College, but compared to the field," Littlepage said.
- Chris Graham