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Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated
Kyle Koster

Jay Bilas Offers Final Rational Take on Complaining About NCAA Tournament Selections

Jay Bilas compares complaining about this to complaining about lines at the DMV. | Get Up

As we rapidly approach the blessed moment where four straight days of non-stop college basketball action captivates everyone who filled out a bracket, it's worth remembering all that was accomplished by complaining about who is in the NCAA tournament field and where they are seeded.

Which is effectively nothing, except for getting one's blood pressure ramped up and filling segments on sports talk shows.

ESPN's Jay Bilas hopped on First Take to offer a very calm and reasonable way to look at the whole process, comparing it to the fait accompli of lamenting long lines at one of the worst places on Earth.

"I used to kind of lose my mind about 8 or 10 years ago about decisions like that—like North Carolina versus West Virginia or Ohio State or Indiana because I always felt like the committee year after year was not sticking to the principles that they said were important."

"Because they do this every year, there's these decisions that kind of don't make any sense relative to their rhetoric I've kind of said 'you know what, they're going to do this every year,'" Bilas added. "It's like complaining about the lines at the DMV. We can complain all we want to, it's not going to change. They're going to keep doing this."

That's not the most satisfying answer but it's probably the best way to keep some measure of calmness over the four days that exist between the reveal of the field and when teams start getting eliminated. Bilas didn't say this and it's probably not popular to defend the committee, but it's is a hard job. And the teams that leave doubt make it harder on themselves and increase the chance that they are hurt by one of these decisions—fair or otherwise.


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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Jay Bilas Offers Final Rational Take on Complaining About NCAA Tournament Selections.

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