Getty Image / Scott Taetsch
We are less than a week away from Selection Sunday in college basketball, which means fans are about to have to deal with some debatable decisions in the near future.
Today, they may have learned about one of them in advance.
This year’s bubble is filled with teams with questionable resumes who are hoping they can do just enough in their conference tournaments to earn a spot in the field of 68.
One of those teams could be getting a resume boost regardless of what they do the rest of the week.
According to Rutgers reporter Aaron Breitman, the NCAA Tournament Section Committee will take the Big Ten saying Rutgers should have won their game against Ohio State in December into consideration.
Per a source, the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee has confirmed they will consider Rutgers' controversial loss to Ohio State as part of their resume.
The Big Ten officially said the winning shot should not have counted. If RU won, it would have been a road Quad 1 victory.
— Aaron Breitman (@aaron_breitman) March 7, 2023
It’s not clear how much of an impact this is going to have on Rutgers’ chances at a spot in the tournament, but this feels like we’re moving in a dangerous direction.
The end of the game between Ohio State and Rutgers got a lot of attention because it was such a blatant error and because it happen in the Big 10. It isn’t the only game involving a team on the tournament bubble where a controversial decision by the refs had a major impact on the outcome.
The University of New Mexico has tumbled out of the tournament conversation lately, but would that still be the case if they had a win at Nevada on their resume? They had a chance to earn that win in double overtime back in January, but a flagrant foul with 14 seconds left in the game after multiple missed fouls took that opportunity away.
Is that not as deserving because the Mountain West didn’t say New Mexico should have won?
There’s also the matter of what else the refs may have missed over the course of the game between Rutgers and Ohio State. Did they get everything else right over the course of the game? Could Ohio State have already been ahead if the refs were better throughout the game?
We are also talking about rewarding Rutgers on a technicality for their performance against a team that went 13-18 this year.
For years we have been taught that circumstances don’t matter in these decisions. Your resume is your resume regardless of how you got there and you just have to live with it.
It seems a bit odd to suddenly change that to help a Big 10 team’s case in a year where the conference might only get 7 teams into tournament field.