The important thing is that Miami gets in, which is what the 31-1 RedHawks deserve. <\/p>\n
Vocal critics, such as former Auburn coach Bruce Pearl<\/a>, don\u2019t believe Miami is one of the best at-large teams in the country. Pearl would (quite obviously) prefer to see his son\u2019s Auburn team \u2014 which has 15 more losses to its name than Miami does \u2014 in the NCAA Tournament. Yes, the Tigers have played one of the nation\u2019s toughest schedules. But the selection committee cannot reflexively reward mediocrity in megaconferences; a team that finished 12th out of 16 teams in its own league should not automatically deserve a chance to play for a national championship. Teams like Auburn, Cincinnati and Indiana do not merit a ton of sympathy from me when they have so many opportunities for resume-boosting Quad 1 wins \u2026 and whiff on so many of them.<\/p>\n Teams like Miami don\u2019t get those chances. <\/p>\n High-major teams simply don\u2019t want to play good mid-major teams. They view those matchups as lose-lose situations; you either beat a team you\u2019re supposed to and get little credit for it, or you lose a buy game, which is embarrassing and potentially very damaging to your resume. Miami didn\u2019t play a single Power 4 (or Big East) team. It played zero Quad 1 games and had just two Quad 2 wins. Because of a strength of schedule ranked 296th (out of 365 Division I teams) and eight games won by one possession or in overtime, the RedHawks rank 93rd in KenPom<\/a> and 64th in NET<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n With March Madness ahead, a look at tournament history. <\/p>\n But it\u2019s not that Miami didn\u2019t try. According to Matt Brown of Extra Points<\/a>, The RedHawks tried to schedule at least 16 Power 4\/Big East schools this season. None said yes. <\/p>\n This is a college basketball issue far bigger than one school and one NCAA Tournament bid. Excluding a team like Miami would end up being taken as a referendum on mid-major basketball itself. If a team that goes undefeated over the course of an entire regular season \u2014 just the fifth time this has happened since the turn of the century \u2014 is left out of March Madness, what is the point of playing? If you\u2019ve got to be perfect and still win your conference\u2019s automatic bid to go dancing, what\u2019s the point of the regular season? If you\u2019ve got to be perfect and win, say, four Quad 1 games (even though nobody that good will schedule you), is that bar too high to ever clear?<\/p>\n These are questions I don\u2019t think the sport wants to answer, and, hopefully, the selection committee will not force them to. It is hard to go undefeated over 31 games, even against a schedule that ranks in the bottom quarter of Division I. If it were that easy to win every game against weak opponents, we would see a lot more undefeated teams every year. <\/p>\n I am hoping the Miami bubble case ends up being debated far longer on social media than it does in the actual committee room. That should be the case, assuming the committee relies heavily on one metric it says it relies heavily upon: Wins Above Bubble<\/a> (WAB). WAB measures a team\u2019s total number of wins compared to how many victories the average bubble team would be expected to have against the same schedule. According to media members who attended a mock selection committee exercise last month, NCAA vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt went out of his way to bring up WAB and its importance \u201cespecially when it comes to selecting teams.\u201d He said that the bubble teams that made the cut last year were more correlated to WAB than they were to any other metrics. <\/p>\n Miami\u2019s WAB is 1.7, 37th in the country. For context, Auburn\u2019s is 0.35 (44th), SMU\u2019s is 0.07 (45th) and Indiana\u2019s is -0.49 (53rd). That metric strips away the uneven schedule strength and tells us something simple: Miami is performing better against its schedule than the average bubble team would. And teams like Auburn, SMU and Indiana wouldn\u2019t have performed as well against Miami\u2019s schedule as the RedHawks have. Essentially, even though those Power 4 bubble teams had tougher schedules, they should have won more games to avoid their current predicaments.<\/p>\n![\"NCAA](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1773468734_396_.jpeg\")
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