Motivated to remove any lingering doubt over whether it belongs in the NCAA tournament, Wichita State captured the Missouri Valley Conference’s automatic bid on Sunday with a 71-51 rout of Illinois State.
Now the selection committee faces a different but no less perplexing conundrum: Where should the Shockers be seeded?
Assessing Wichita State is unusually difficult because the Shockers (30-4) often look like one of the best teams in the country even if they don’t have many marquee wins as validation.
On one hand, Wichita State assembled an aggressive non-conference schedule featuring five games against name-brand opponents. On the other hand, the Shockers lost to Louisville, Michigan State and Oklahoma State and didn’t prove much by beating rebuilding Oklahoma and woeful LSU.
On one hand, Wichita State ripped through the Valley, winning 20 of 21 games against league opponents by an average of 21.5 points apiece. On the other hand, the only other top 100 team in the Valley is Illinois State, who also handed the Shockers their lone league loss.
On one hand, history is on Wichita State’s side: The Shockers have won nine NCAA tournament games the past four seasons including five as the lesser-seeded team. On the other hand, history shouldn’t matter: The selection committee is instructed to consider only this season’s results.
Even the most prominent computer metrics aren’t much help assessing Wichita State. The RPI, which doesn’t include margin of victory, ranks the Shockers 37th. KenPom, which does take margin of victory into account, has the Shockers 13th.
The challenge for the selection committee is to find a way to seed Wichita State that’s fair to the Shockers and their opponents. Wichita State doesn’t have the quality wins to merit a favorable seeding, yet how would you like to be the No. 6 seed who Las Vegas oddsmakers anoint a five-point underdog against the Shockers in round one? Or the No. 2 seed who’s facing a top 15 KenPom opponent in round two?
Wichita State posed a similar dilemma last year when the selection committee sent the Shockers to the First Four even though advanced metrics suggested the Shockers were one of the nation’s 15 best teams. Ask Vanderbilt and Arizona how that turned out. The Commodores lost by 20 and the Wildcats were so thoroughly beaten that coach Sean Miller famously sweated through his shirt by halftime.
Before winning the Valley tournament, Wichita State was among the nation’s most polarizing bubble teams on bracket projections, earning a No. 7 seed from Yahoo Sports and a No. 8 seed from ESPN.com yet finding itself a No. 12 seed at USA Today and among the first four teams left out at CBSSports.com. Expect similarly disparate opinions among the committee members when they convene next week in New York.
The danger of awarding Wichita State a double-digit seed was on display Sunday afternoon in Saint Louis when the Shockers dismantled an Illinois State team with long-shot at-large aspirations of its own.
Sharpshooting Conner Frankamp propelled Wichita State to an early lead with a trio of first-half 3-pointers, while strong second halves from forward Markis McDuffie and guard Landry Shamet helped the Shockers further pull away. Wichita State also played its typical brand of smothering defense, harassing the Redbirds into 29.3 percent shooting.
So where should Wichita State be seeded? Somewhere around a No. 6 or 7 seed feels most fair.
That’s about as close as the selection committee can come to finding a spot on the bracket that’s fair to Wichita State and its potential opponents, that doesn’t ignore the Shockers’ top 15 KenPom ranking or the blemishes on their resume.
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