By Ed Morrone
For the second time in a week, and this time with the aid of the NCAA selection committee, George Mason dealt the Pride a low blow.
A week after Patriots guard Tony Skinn punched the Pride’s Loren Stokes in the groin, the committee members left the Pride out of the 65-team NCAA Tournament, but let Mason in, despite the fact the Blue & Gold beat them twice in 11 days. As a result, the Pride was selected to the less prestigious National Invitation Tournament (NIT), where it will host the University of Nebraska tonight.
“If I could explain it to you I would, but obviously I can’t,” Pride head coach Tom Pecora said in a gracious impromptu speech in front of about 200 who gathered on campus in Margiotta Hall to watch the selection show. “We’re going to move forward, try and win some NIT games and I expect everyone to continue to be really supportive.”
Pecora took the news surprisingly well, but that couldn’t change the aura of disappointment that hung in the room after the Pride watched teams like George Mason and Air Force be selected, even though they both failed to advance to their conference championship games.
“It [Selection Sunday] was a great experience,” junior guard Carlos Rivera said. “But I definitely think we should’ve been in. We beat Mason twice, so I don’t know how they picked them over us.”
On Feb. 23, then No. 25-ranked GMU came into Hofstra Arena as the first ranked team ever to play on campus and were quickly dismissed, 77-66. On March 5 in the CAA Tournament semifinals in Richmond, Va., the Pride erased a six-point halftime lead and held the Patriots to just 16 second half point, en route to a 58-49 victory. That brought Mason’s record to 0-2 against the Pride, so surely it was evident which team would become the CAA’s first at large berth into the NCAA Tournament.
Well, not according to chairman of the committee, Craig Littlepage.
“We looked at George Mason as a team that was a regular season co-champion,” Littlepage said. “We looked at their nonconference schedule and felt they put together a solid package in terms of those games, and they won a fair share of those games. They were a very good team for us.”
Though the Pride defeated Mason twice, the nonconference schedule to is probably what did the Pride in. The Patriots’ nonconference schedule included a win at Wichita State and losses at proven teams in Wake Forest, Creighton and Mississippi State, while the Pride’s biggest win was at St. John’s, a team that failed to even qualify for the NIT.
“I guess we have to try and schedule up a little bit more, which is very difficult for us to do unless you’re going to play all the games on the road,” Pecora said. “But I’ll get more creative on how to schedule more games if that’s what it takes.”
An easy way the Pride can avoid a similar fate next March is to simply win the conference tournament, which it lost this year at the hands of UNC-Wilmington. The team will lose graduating senior forwards Aurimas Kieza and Adrian Uter, but it will also return its three best players; Stokes, Rivera and Antoine Agudio, so a conference championship should be a reasonable goal next year as well.
Until that time comes, the Pride will have to be content with its second consecutive NIT berth.
“We’re probably going to be one of the favorites, so we have to go in there and show the committee what we have so next year we can change their minds,” Agudio said.
Make sure to check www.hofstrachronicle.com/sportswire for updates in the Pride’s NIT run.
Hofstra misses NCAA tournament.
