This is such a joyous week that I should probably wait until another time to follow up on this, but Tommy did say he's interested in hearing it....
A few days after Selection Sunday 2000, Dick "Hoops" Weiss did an interview with George Plaster (and maybe Willy Daunic) on WWTN Manchester. Weiss, until 2013 the CBB basketball writer for the New York Daily News, said that from those in the room he had the story of what happened in that committee. I'm going from memory, but apparently they just didn't bother preparing brackets for all the contingencies when Arkansas made the SEC semifinals. Of course Vanderbilt was in their prospective field--we were an 8 or 9 in the few published mock brackets of the time, including Jerry Palm's.
When the Hogs won on Saturday, meaning a non-at-large selection would be playing a few hours before the selection for an automatic bid, panic set in. They had already set their field, with a ton of midmajor A-L selections already "in." Making room for Arkansas would mean removing one of them, and each one had its advocate on the committee. In the end the only resolution was to remove the bottom seeded SEC team, which happened to be Vanderbilt. The rules clearly stated bids aren't allocated by conference, but the selection show was looming and they were at an impasse.
I never heard this interview. I report the contents second-hand from one of the message boards at the time, which means the info is at least third-hand via Weiss and the person posting it. If I were you, I wouldn't trust this "evidence" based on Philip's 17 year old memories and say-so.
Nevertheless, I sincerely believe this is probably what happened, based on several circumstances:
I posted another comment last night so perhaps Hoops could claim to have "misthreaded" his reply on that tweet, but.... hmm....
Somewhere in there I got the sense that Les Robinson of NC State may have been Hoops' source. Les had some sort of background with VU. I was disappointed that he would sign off on this, but I guess it would be a lot to ask him to resign, but publicly resigning from the committee would burn a lot of bridges so I get it.
If you take nothing else from this, please remember: VANDERBILT'S 2000 SNUB WAS NOTHING AT ALL LIKE THE PROVERBIAL "A DIFFERENT BUBBLE TEAM EACH YEAR" WHOSE FANS ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT SOMETHING. Nothing at all. If you're a projected 11 seed and don't make it, well, try to play better next year. If CBS is billing your star as in the tournament and everyone thinks you're an 8 or 9....
They didn't know what to do when Arkansas won so they removed a clearly deserving team because of the conference. They violated their own rules, and the MWC commish lied on TV. Despite my flimsy evidence I believe it's that simple.
A few days after Selection Sunday 2000, Dick "Hoops" Weiss did an interview with George Plaster (and maybe Willy Daunic) on WWTN Manchester. Weiss, until 2013 the CBB basketball writer for the New York Daily News, said that from those in the room he had the story of what happened in that committee. I'm going from memory, but apparently they just didn't bother preparing brackets for all the contingencies when Arkansas made the SEC semifinals. Of course Vanderbilt was in their prospective field--we were an 8 or 9 in the few published mock brackets of the time, including Jerry Palm's.
When the Hogs won on Saturday, meaning a non-at-large selection would be playing a few hours before the selection for an automatic bid, panic set in. They had already set their field, with a ton of midmajor A-L selections already "in." Making room for Arkansas would mean removing one of them, and each one had its advocate on the committee. In the end the only resolution was to remove the bottom seeded SEC team, which happened to be Vanderbilt. The rules clearly stated bids aren't allocated by conference, but the selection show was looming and they were at an impasse.
I never heard this interview. I report the contents second-hand from one of the message boards at the time, which means the info is at least third-hand via Weiss and the person posting it. If I were you, I wouldn't trust this "evidence" based on Philip's 17 year old memories and say-so.
Nevertheless, I sincerely believe this is probably what happened, based on several circumstances:
- The situation was clearly out of the norm. Vanderbilt was not on the bubble. CBS had promoted Dan Langhi as a player to watch in the upcoming tournament. It was indisputable to anyone who studied this carefully that the team had docked the SEC a bid for Arkansas.
- Academic committees are sometimes dysfunctional. Don't laugh--leadership makes all the difference. An ineffective committee could easily result in this kind of panic, even for a billion dollar tournament.
- WWTN archived Plaster's show daily, but for whatever reason that never showed up in the archive.
- The marginal A-L midmajors did in fact match up perfectly with the committee: Pepperdine, St. Bona, and Indiana State each had a committee member from their conference.
- ...and UNLV, whose conference wasn't even supposed to get an automatic bid that year, had the MWC commissioner as the committee chair. Media reports mentioned a committee sentiment for an "automatic bid" to the MWC tournament champ even though as a first-year conference there was no such thing.
- Needless to say, the SEC had no rep on the cmtee.
- I did some basic numerical analysis and found that teams from conferences on the cmtee almost all got better seedings on average than projected by Blue Ribbon and Palm. The Big Ten and SEC, with no reps, got worse seeds.
- (How sad is it that I can still name most of these committee members 17 years later?)
- Someone noted that the bracket was consistent with plugging in Arkansas at the last minute. Move up UNLV one line to Vanderbilt's #10 South spot, put Ark in as #11, and it all just works.
- Lately on Twitter I've taken to baiting Hoops Weiss to try to tell us what happened. Last night is the second time I've gotten a response like this:
I posted another comment last night so perhaps Hoops could claim to have "misthreaded" his reply on that tweet, but.... hmm....
Somewhere in there I got the sense that Les Robinson of NC State may have been Hoops' source. Les had some sort of background with VU. I was disappointed that he would sign off on this, but I guess it would be a lot to ask him to resign, but publicly resigning from the committee would burn a lot of bridges so I get it.
If you take nothing else from this, please remember: VANDERBILT'S 2000 SNUB WAS NOTHING AT ALL LIKE THE PROVERBIAL "A DIFFERENT BUBBLE TEAM EACH YEAR" WHOSE FANS ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT SOMETHING. Nothing at all. If you're a projected 11 seed and don't make it, well, try to play better next year. If CBS is billing your star as in the tournament and everyone thinks you're an 8 or 9....
They didn't know what to do when Arkansas won so they removed a clearly deserving team because of the conference. They violated their own rules, and the MWC commish lied on TV. Despite my flimsy evidence I believe it's that simple.
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