Utah State basketball: Selection committee sticks it to USU again

An Open Letter to the NCAA Selection Committee:

Dear sirs,

Please direct your attention to the statistical box that accompanies this column. See a trend here? Utah State has earned a dozen NCAA invitations since seeding began — and the best they can get is a 10th seed?

Thanks for nothing.

This year they win 30 of 33 games and they're seeded — what? — 12th.

What are you guys drinking when you do this?

Frankly, the Aggies are developing a complex. If they didn't know better, they'd think you don't like them. What's a team got to do to get a little respect out here?

Win 30 games? Done it, twice in three years.

Win a conference championship? Done it, repeatedly.

Win the conference tournament? Pa-lease.

Win the regular season conference championship AND the postseason tournament? Done it.

A national ranking? Check.

A top-25 RPI ranking? Got it.

Look, this doesn't even include the times when a deserving Utah State didn't get in the tournament at all — in 2004 (25-3) and 2002, 2007 and 2008 (23 and 24 wins).

Here are the numbers for Utah State in 2011: 30-3 record, conference regular-season champion, conference tournament champion, a No. 17 national ranking, an RPI of 15.

Question: What's an unbeaten season get them, a 10th seed and a door prize?

Nobody put it better than ESPN's Pat Forde when he said USU is set up for failure every year by the NCAA, and then when USU loses the committee can say, "See, we told you they aren't that good."

Utah State has won one of its last nine NCAA tournament games — a 2001 upset of Ohio State.

The beauty of the NCAA basketball tournament supposedly is that it is a fair system for determining a national champion. It is considered the ideal format, especially when compared to the system used by college football, which has been hijacked by the BCS and determines a national champion by polls and by stacking the odds against non-BCS conferences.

BCS critics often point to the NCAA basketball tournament as the model and offer it as proof that a postseason tournament is attainable and inherently fairer than the sham BCS method.