Just Because I'm Annoyed.......

[pokechecker]

Re: Just Because I'm Annoyed.......

you don't think playing in MN would have made a difference?
it was 40 and raining this Saturday, it was d** cold
I would have loved to see how Alabama would have played on a MN spring day

 

[KTDC]

Re: Just Because I'm Annoyed.......

I think Jessica Allister, the Gopher coach, was justifyably upset with the lack of seeding for her team. However, once the tournament started, there was no more talk from the team about the unfairness of the seeding process. The Gophers were beaten fair and square by a team that, on that day, was the better team. Nobody associated with the Gophers is, to my knowledge, complaining about the outcome.

Most of these players will return next year, and I hope this experience will help them bring their A game when they get back to the postseason.

Sorry, I shouldn't get too far into this. But I feel so strongly about this and I couldn't disagree more. My point has nothing to do with that they weren't beaten fair and square by Alabama.

The players may not be "complaining about what they were put through" but they absolutely were feeling it. They aren't the Boston Celtics, they are a bunch of 20 year old softball players who got cut down to size on a national scale right when they were supposed to get their rewards for putting together a fantastic season.

By all rights they shouldn't have been in Alabama, playing Alabama with Florida on the horizon.

The players need to be defended and the committee needs to be blamed on this one until the bitter end.

As silly as that may sound, those are the facts man

 

[Leather helmet]

Re: Just Because I'm Annoyed.......

Sorry, I shouldn't get too far into this. But I feel so strongly about this and I couldn't disagree more. My point has nothing to do with that they weren't beaten fair and square by Alabama.

The players may not be "complaining about what they were put through" but they absolutely were feeling it. They aren't the Boston Celtics, they are a bunch of 20 year old softball players who got cut down to size on a national scale right when they were supposed to get their rewards for putting together a fantastic season.

By all rights they shouldn't have been in Alabama, playing Alabama with Florida on the horizon.

The players need to be defended and the committee needs to be blamed on this one until the bitter end.

As silly as that may sound, those are the facts man

I mostly agree with you. They should have hosted a regional this weekend, instead of traveling to Tuscaloosa. Everyone agrees with that.

My original point was that it is a shame that the Gophers were unable to put an exclamation point on that injustice, by beating Alabama. The way things shook out, it is hard to say to the selection committee that they were incorrect in ranking Alabama above the Gophers.

 

[Timothy A]

Re: Just Because I'm Annoyed.......

The way things shook out, it is hard to say to the selection committee that they were incorrect in ranking Alabama above the Gophers.

Exactly. The UW men's BB team was under-seeded in the ncaa's this last year and they had some huge wins that put pie in the face of the committee. UM just made the committee look right.

 

[spwood]

Re: Just Because I'm Annoyed.......

I mostly agree with you. They should have hosted a regional this weekend, instead of traveling to Tuscaloosa. Everyone agrees with that.

My original point was that it is a shame that the Gophers were unable to put an exclamation point on that injustice, by beating Alabama. The way things shook out, it is hard to say to the selection committee that they were incorrect in ranking Alabama above the Gophers.

Alabama won a pair of 1-0 games at home. They didn't make the selection committee look right at all. Think playing those games in Minnesota wouldn't have made a difference? They gave an unfair advantage to an SEC team (color me shocked) and Alabama took advantage of it. Nothing I saw this weekend makes the committee look "correct" in snubbing the Gophers. This whole thing stunk to high hell.

 

[Eeyore]

Re: Just Because I'm Annoyed.......

My original point was that it is a shame that the Gophers were unable to put an exclamation point on that injustice, by beating Alabama. The way things shook out, it is hard to say to the selection committee that they were incorrect in ranking Alabama above the Gophers.

I didn't have a big problem with Minnesota being seeded behind Alabama, who was also underseeded. It was a brutal regional, pitting two of the top 12 teams in the country against each other.

I had an enormous problem with Minnesota being seeded behind Ole Miss, LSU, Kentucky, and South Carolina. Send the Gophers to one of those sites, let alone hosting, and they're playing next weekend.

 

[Eeyore]

Re: Just Because I'm Annoyed.......

I'm far from an expert here, but I did stumble across the second Alabama - Minnesota game on TV. I watched 4 or so innings and the strike calls looked reasonable to me (only a quarter of the total innings of course, but a meaningful sample). Minnesota just looked overmatched at the plate - rarely (if at all) saw them connect solidly on a pitch.

The strike zone was much better on Sunday than it was on Saturday, though even then, I thought the ump was extremely generous on the outside corner. Several pitches in the opposite batter's box were called strikes. I don't think it was inconsistent, but it played to Alabama's advantage because Littlejohn uses the outside corner as her bread and butter, while Groenewegen mostly uses vertical movement.

On Saturday, though, it was a disaster.

I don't know if Minnesota got screwed or not in the softball tournament rankings, but I sure hope that they didn't take the "look how oppressed we are" approach. Regardless, they weren't a strong enough team to overcome the adveristy (perceived or real).

It wasn't a lack of strength of character. It was running into 2 of the 15 best pitchers in Division 1, pitching extremely well, at home. Littlejohn took exquisite advantage of that expanded strike zone, putting the ball in an unhittable spot over and over. On Saturday, Osorio turned the scouting report on her upside down; her out pitch is a riseball that's up out of the zone, and the Gophers followed the scouting report and let it go by, which few teams have managed to do. Osorio adjusted by throwing changeups in the zone. The main criticism I have of the Gophers in that game is that they didn't adjust fast enough, but the reason you saw so many called third strikes is because they were following the scouting report. Credit Osorio with being able to change her pitching style, something few kids in the college game are able to do. (Adding Groenewegen, the quality of the pitching in Tuscaloosa was unreal.)

In fact, I'd argue that it was an act of character that cost the Gophers on Saturday. If Maddie Houlihan had stood still and let herself get hit by the pitch with the bases loaded in the 8th inning, rather than getting out of the way like you're supposed to, Minnesota wins that game, and Sunday turns into a very different story.

 

[D2D]

Re: Just Because I'm Annoyed.......

Michael Rand's take:

http://www.startribune.com/gophers-...646523/?om_rid=1570783689&om_mid=1570783689#1

 

[ARM]

Re: Just Because I'm Annoyed.......

I'm far from an expert here, but I did stumble across the second Alabama - Minnesota game on TV. ... They were unable to rise to the occasion and lost to a better team this weekend.

The Gophers obviously could have hit far better, and didn't. But the "better team" theory is a stretch. The teams were pretty even through 8 innings on Saturday, and then Alabama gets a gift run thanks to a phantom HBP and a ball four that wasn't. If Minnesota's offense was non-existent, so was Alabama's. Had the Gophers gotten two free runners at some point in that game after getting a couple on, then we'd be talking about how they were supposedly better. The loser has to play another game, and that wound up being 9 innings in a game that got pushed back to Sunday due to weather. Having to play in an elimination game became an even bigger disadvantage than it would have been with better weather. The difference in Alabama and Minnesota was minute at best, and likely came down to the home team would always have the advantage.

The committee wasn't wrong about the Gophers overall -- the tourney will go on just fine without them -- but neither were they right. They make statements about the incredible amount of parity in the sport, and then base their seedings on performance against the top 10 over everything else. If there is so much parity, why would it matter to that extent over something like the RPI, which even though we all know that RPI sucks, is supposedly an objective, scientific ranking? It has to at least be possible that if a team loses only 3 games in a landscape of parity it is doing something right. When you give so much weight to performance versus the top 10 at the extent of other factors, if you've erred in picking that top 10, your error is compounded. And why top 10 in a sport where the major dividing lines come at 8 and 16?

The NCAA wants the appearance of objective rankings, but they really don't want them. They want to be able to go under the covers when necessary and tweak the results so that they wind up with the matchups that they can market and get teams into the super regionals and beyond that they can promote. When all 16 seeded teams advance, is that a sign that the NCAA is super great at picking the 16 best teams in the country, or could it be that getting to host is a huge advantage?

 

[Eeyore]

Re: Just Because I'm Annoyed.......

The NCAA wants the appearance of objective rankings, but they really don't want them. They want to be able to go under the covers when necessary and tweak the results so that they wind up with the matchups that they can market and get teams into the super regionals and beyond that they can promote.

Which brings up another problem the NCAA has here, or at least the appearance of one. ESPN owns the SEC Network, and, as a consequence, easily 90% of the softball coverage at espn.com is of the SEC. (Baseball has the same issue, but has better alternative outlets.) If your concern is marketing, then you would go out of your way to make sure that as many SEC teams as possible make the tournament (and it's hard to select more than all of them, which is what the committee did), and you'd make sure that as many as possible host and move on to the super regionals. Double that if you're trying to please the entity that is paying you to broadcast the tournament. Mission accomplished.

I don't think that there's a conspiracy to do this, as incompetence and innumeracy go a long way towards explaining what happened. But I do suspect that there's a subconscious desire on the part of the committee to have SEC teams in for these reasons.

 

[spwood]

Re: Just Because I'm Annoyed.......

Which brings up another problem the NCAA has here, or at least the appearance of one. ESPN owns the SEC Network, and, as a consequence, easily 90% of the softball coverage at espn.com is of the SEC. (Baseball has the same issue, but has better alternative outlets.) If your concern is marketing, then you would go out of your way to make sure that as many SEC teams as possible make the tournament (and it's hard to select more than all of them, which is what the committee did), and you'd make sure that as many as possible host and move on to the super regionals. Double that if you're trying to please the entity that is paying you to broadcast the tournament. Mission accomplished.

I don't think that there's a conspiracy to do this, as incompetence and innumeracy go a long way towards explaining what happened. But I do suspect that there's a subconscious desire on the part of the committee to have SEC teams in for these reasons.

I am far from a conspiracy theorist, but I can't argue with your premise here. I think the Committee went out of its way, short of just giving them byes in the Regionals, to put SEC teams in the best position to advance. Sure, they still have to win on the field, but in the case of two evenly matched teams (Minnesota and Alabama), that home field advantage was probably the difference.

The NCAA ought to be (but isn't) ashamed of itself...

 

[brokentwig]

Re: Just Because I'm Annoyed.......

I am far from a conspiracy theorist, but I can't argue with your premise here. I think the Committee went out of its way, short of just giving them byes in the Regionals, to put SEC teams in the best position to advance. Sure, they still have to win on the field, but in the case of two evenly matched teams (Minnesota and Alabama), that home field advantage was probably the difference.

The NCAA ought to be (but isn't) ashamed of itself...

Home Field advantage?? If the Gophers were really that good they should have been able to beat Alabama anywhere. I really feel sorry for a student athlete who boards a plane, stays at the finest hotels, and is treated like a rock star on the big stage playing a game that they all love. They were in short sleeve uniforms instead of layers of underarmor. This is the way softball is meant to be played.

They had just as many fans in Alabama as they would have had at home.

 

[KTDC]

Re: Just Because I'm Annoyed.......

Home Field advantage?? If the Gophers were really that good they should have been able to beat Alabama anywhere. I really feel sorry for a student athlete who boards a plane, stays at the finest hotels, and is treated like a rock star on the big stage playing a game that they all love. They were in short sleeve uniforms instead of layers of underarmor. This is the way softball is meant to be played.

They had just as many fans in Alabama as they would have had at home.

So you're saying the seeding doesn't matter. All the people throughout the country that cared about who they were playing against and where were misguided and it's just much ado about nothing?

Most of us weren't claiming the Gophers were "really that good" to beat anybody, anywhere, anytime-but rather their body of work during the season earned them a seeding that they weren't given-(that opinion was virtually universal).

The Gophers had a goal at the start of the year to make it to the College World Series for the first time. After the Big Ten Tournament they had a very good chance to achieve that goal. After the Selection Show on Sunday night their chance to get to the world series was barely better than their chance to win the World Series would have been had they been seeded properly. They got royally screwed by the committee.

 

[Timothy A]

Re: Just Because I'm Annoyed.......

For any teams I follow, the goal I want for them to reach is post-season play. On the road, at home, it doesn't matter, just make it into the post season. Once in the post season, you control your own destiny. Just WIN.

 

[KTDC]

Re: Just Because I'm Annoyed.......

For any teams I follow, the goal I want for them to reach is post-season play. On the road, at home, it doesn't matter, just make it into the post season. Once in the post season, you control your own destiny. Just WIN.

Yes, that's the general rule, and that makes sense. I'm saying this isn't a general rule situation, this is an exceptional case

The players need to be defended and the committee needs to be blamed on this one until the bitter end.

The problem wasn't just that they had to go on the road in a tough matchup, it was that they were going to be in their own heads. After a national uproar over the committee's seeding, the stakes had risen to unnaturally high levels. They could sense they were in a situation where if they got beat, all sorts of people were going to come out and say "the committee was right" and "if they were as good as all that, they would have beaten Alabama" and all of that. Of course they could sense that they were in that kind of a situation.

So try as they might to get over it and get ready to play the games, when they run into something like a tough strike zone and a razor sharp pitcher they don't go "into the zone" of peak performance. They go "into their heads". The events of the past week and the high stakes are going to be there messing with their minds.

I think a lot of people are missing what a messed up situation they were really in emotionally and mentally.

 

[Eeyore]

Re: Just Because I'm Annoyed.......

For any teams I follow, the goal I want for them to reach is post-season play. On the road, at home, it doesn't matter, just make it into the post season. Once in the post season, you control your own destiny. Just WIN.

I'd find this more convincing if you weren't the guy who whines about having to play in Minneapolis the last series of the season two years in a row.

 

[Timothy A]

Re: Just Because I'm Annoyed.......

I'd find this more convincing if you weren't the guy who whines about having to play in Minneapolis the last series of the season two years in a row.

LOL, mind your own thread.....haha

 

[Russell Jaslow]

Re: Just Because I'm Annoyed.......

Speaking of home field advantage, this was posted on the Oswego threat a few weeks ago in the D3 board:

"Congrats to the SUNY Oswego Lakers who were given the greatest home-field advantage ever: inclement weather in Oswego has lead the cancellation of the 2017 SUNYAC Baseball Championships. The top-seeded Lakers will be crowned Champions by default, despite not playing a single game, and will receive the conference's AQ."

 

[spwood]

Re: Just Because I'm Annoyed.......

Speaking of home field advantage, this was posted on the Oswego threat a few weeks ago in the D3 board:

"Congrats to the SUNY Oswego Lakers who were given the greatest home-field advantage ever: inclement weather in Oswego has lead the cancellation of the 2017 SUNYAC Baseball Championships. The top-seeded Lakers will be crowned Champions by default, despite not playing a single game, and will receive the conference's AQ."

Let's remember they did "play a single game" - they won the regular season championship.

 

[Russell Jaslow]

Let's remember they did "play a single game" - they won the regular season championship.

Not playing a single "playoff" game. Come on, you know the point. This was a discussion on home field advantage, and in a very interesting and humorous way, Oswego owned the greatest home field advantage of all.

They deserved it because like you said, they won the regular season championship. But that's not the point.