Here is a quick rant. So the selection committee uses RPI right? I hate the number but they claim to use it.
Of the top 54 RPI, 8 schools didn't make it.
St Bonaventure
Monmouth
Saint Mary's
Hofstra
Valpo
Akron
Princeton
San Diego State
You see the trend here? Zero of those schools belong to one of the "power conferences". Why is that? Any team that was top 54 in RPI and was also a power conference team was put in he tournament.
Why not those 8? And this is the bullshyt. Their reasoning is because these teams don't have enough top 50 wins. Well, the conference they play in doesn't allow for that during league play. And here is the bigger overall issue... Out of conference NO ONE will schedule to play against these teams at heir place or on a neutral. Maybe they'll play them at home, but that's a pretty hard game to win for these guys.
So it's rigged from the start really. They can't schedule big schools out of conference, and they're left out because they don't have enough wins against the big schools.
The thing that bothers me is the bubble teams are rarely rarely rarely gonna make extremely deep runs, so why not just give some of these smaller schools a shot because they don't get as many at bats against good comp as these mediocre power schools that wind up in the tourney and losing the first weekend.