After all the red-meat propaganda, NC State now has legit beef with NCAA after baseball snub
All those times the Wolfpack cried wolf, and now the wolf has arrived at the door.
N.C. State has turned blaming the NCAA into a cottage industry, in the apparent belief that the NCAA (like the ACC) has deep reserves of feeling about the Wolfpack that must be expressed at every occasion. In almost every case, there were reasonable, if frustrating, explanations about how N.C. State and the NCAA ended up doing the dances they did.
But the outrage over the baseball team being left out of the NCAA tournament Monday, is 100 percent warranted.
There’s no way, based on decades of precedent, to explain how the selection committee could logically arrive at this decision. A worthy team was denied a chance to play for a championship for reasons that are as arbitrary as they are unusual.
Inexcusable.
And in that sense, this is different from everything that has gone before.
The prolonged investigation into Dennis Smith Jr. and Mark Gottfried that acted like an anchor on the basketball program for years? Everyone else in that situation has suffered through the same delays with the NCAA’s unwieldy and overblown new independent investigative process. If anything, N.C. State’s case moved more quickly than others.
The NCAA handled the situation in Omaha last year poorly and heartlessly, but not outside of the COVID rules everyone had come to know and understand. There were some gray areas with breakthrough infections, a new phenomenon at the time, but the quarantining of unvaccinated players and testing of vaccinated players after a positive followed a familiar path.
As for the Holiday Bowl, the NCAA caught a stray there. It’s still unclear how Dave Doeren got to “No Clue At All” when, again, things proceeded not unexpectedly once UCLA ran out of defensive linemen the morning of the game. The decision not to award a forfeit win followed established NCAA and ACC guidelines. Everyone knew the rule going in. It just ended poorly. No one, not N.C. State nor UCLA nor Fox Sports nor the Holiday Bowl wanted it that way. Sometimes that happens.
Now, things get hairier with women’s basketball. That committee blindly followed its own rules to a terrible conclusion. A No. 1 seed shouldn’t have to play a road game against the biggest program in the sport in a regional final. Period. End of story. It’s the kind of thing that provokes future change, even if the NCAA wasn’t bold enough at the time to right an obvious wrong
That’s a lot of baggage and history, to be sure, but collectively it’s more paranoia than persecution.
But baseball deserved better, unequivocally. People who follow college baseball closely, and bless their hearts, are baffled by the snub. It’s only going to lend credence to the conspiracy theorists on the fringes of the fan base, whose numbers will certainly grow having been fed not red-meat propaganda this time but a legit beef.
The simple solution to this is: Win the ACC title, which N.C. State hasn’t done in football, men’s basketball or baseball in three decades … although even that didn’t help the women’s basketball team.
It’s all kind of like N.C. State not getting an at-large bid to the men’s basketball tournament in 2019. If you don’t give the committee the chance to overlook you, they can’t overlook you. Control what you can control.
And when you constantly blame the NCAA for things that aren’t the NCAA’s fault (like the Holiday Bowl), eventually the kind of people who volunteer their time on NCAA committees — a labor of love, to be sure — may tend not to give you the benefit of the doubt, even subconsciously.
That doesn’t explain Wofford’s omission, though, which had as strong a case as N.C. State for inclusion and no prior history with the NCAA. Sometimes, incompetence is just incompetence. Bad decisions are just bad decisions. Not that that will make this go down any easier.
N.C. State loves to point fingers at the NCAA, even when those fingers should be pointed elsewhere — or inward. This time, they’re pointing the right direction.
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