(Photo from Ole Miss Athletics)
- It’s nice to see the Rebels and the Bulldogs headed for a Selection Sunday sweet spot.
Andy Kennedy resigned as Ole Miss basketball coach in 2018, the year before the NCAA introduced its’ “net rankings” system as a key metric in determining at-large bids for March Madness.
Kennedy, twice the SEC coach of the year, became the winningest coach in Ole Miss history.
But he didn’t win the right games enough of the time – the games that got you into the NCAA Tournament.
During the transition then-Ole Miss AD Ross Bjork said his goal for basketball was that the Rebels would skip all the bubble nonsense and wake up on the morning of Selection Sunday with the secure feeling that you were solidly in the field. That you’d done enough.
For the first time in my association with Ole Miss basketball the Rebels are headed for that Selection Sunday sweet spot.
Chris Beard has done a solid coaching job, such that he’ll stir the coaching carousel chatter, but the Rebels owe some degree of thanks to SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey for their postseason comfort zone.
Mississippi State is also well within the field, according to ESPN bracketologist Joe Lunardi, who had both of the Mississippi entries as seven seeds before Saturday when Ole Miss and State had home wins against Oklahoma and LSU respectively.
Frankly, it’s bigger news for Ole Miss at this point because of the Rebels’ meager modern history for March Madness compared to the Bulldogs.
State is seeking its third-straight bid in three seasons under Chris Jans as coach. That hasn’t happened for the Bulldogs since their run of four-straight bids from 2002-2005.
Lunardi will update his bracket again Tuesday, but for now, Mississippi’s SEC entries are solidly in, bypassing Dayton, which is part of March Madness but has the tag of being the “play-in game” to reach the traditional bracket of 64 teams.
The current Lunardi bracket has 13 of the 16 SEC teams making the field?
That’s a byproduct of being the No. 1 ranked conference in the Net Rankings.
The league has ranked third behind the Big 12 and the Big 10 the last three years. The new ranking is due in part to Sankey putting more emphasis on basketball at the conference level, hiring Mike Tranghese and Dan Deibovitz as administrators.
High praise from Bilas
The schools bought in and began to put an emphasis on hiring better coaches.
“This is the most powerful basketball league, top to bottom, that there has ever been,” ESPN’s Jay Bilas said on the SEC Network earlier this month. “I have never seen anything remotely like what we’re seeing in the Southeastern Conference this year.”
It’s been speculated that eight SEC wins will be enough for an at-large bid, and Lunardi’s projections support that theory.
The resume is a season-long project, and Ole Miss did some good work early with a neutral-site win over Brigham Young and a road win at Louisville. Those two are 25 and 26 in the most recent Net Rankings.
In conference play the Rebels added a win at Alabama and a home win against Kentucky.
It’s all added up to a No. 28 net ranking with five Quad 1 wins.
State’s current net ranking puts it at No. 30. The Bulldogs have two more Quad 1 wins – which can be identified as their regular season sweep of the Rebels – but also have a Quad 2 loss.
Maybe one day I’ll go back to school for some advanced education and see if I can better understand all this.
What I do know is that the numbers are important, and they have to be on your side to take you from March Sadness to March Madness, but there’s still a human element to the selection process.
Some team that fancies itself as worthy – and may have the resume to support that argument – is going to get left out. It happens every year.
That’s why the Rebels’ win over Oklahoma was big. It helps with the eye test.
Ole Miss has the misfortune of facing three top-five teams in the run to the finish starting last Wednesday at No. 1 Auburn where the Rebels’ lost 106-76.
The regular season concludes this week, and Ole Miss is at home against No. 5 Tennessee Wednesday then at No. 3 Florida Saturday. Without the OU win there’s a reasonable chance Ole Miss would have carried a six-game skid into postseason which is not the look you want.
Important early work
Credit Beard for this team already having done the necessary postseason work. The Rebels aren’t in the position of having to win one of these games to earn a bid, though getting one or both would do wonders for seeding.
So could an SEC Tournament run in Nashville.
Same for the Bulldogs, who close at home against Texas Tuesday then travel to Arkansas Saturday.
I hung on long enough in newspaper to make a handful of NCAA Tournaments, at least one while covering for each of Mississippi’s Division I schools: twice with Clarence Weatherspoon and Southern Miss, once with Mississippi State under Rick Stansbury, and twice with Kennedy and the Rebels.
In my mind, no other event compares. There’s something neat about powering up in the work room with mounted televisions around, each tuned to other NCAA sites and knowing the game you’re about to cover is one part of something really big.
Hopefully State and Ole Miss finish the regular season strong, but at least for now, it’s nice to see them on the inside.
Parrish Alford
