Arizona coach Chip Hale hasn’t slept well lately, and Sunday night was no exception. His Wildcats have been in must-win mode for weeks, and Monday morning, they would learn whether it was all worthwhile.
Before going to bed, Hale rehearsed three or four speeches that were contingent on the outcome of the NCAA Selection Show.
“Good ones, bad ones,” Hale said. “Good news, bad news.”
Hale was able to deliver the good-news address: Arizona made the NCAA Tournament as one of the last four teams in. The UA will face TCU on Friday in the Fayetteville Regional, hosted by No. 3 overall seed Arkansas.
Whoever plotted out the ESPN2 broadcast made the Wildcats sweat: “Arizona” didn’t pop onto the screen until the very last regional was revealed, more than a half-hour into the show.
“It was nerve-racking,” Hale said. “I felt for the guys. I've been through these things, whether it's professional baseball, trying to get in the playoffs, or in the college ranks when I was here.
“There was a lot of nerves going on. ... There was a lot of stress going on.”
The Wildcats let it all out in their locker room, dogpiling onto one of the blue couches from which players were watching the show. It was a stark contrast to the mood after Saturday night’s Pac-12 Tournament championship game in Scottsdale. Arizona lost 5-4 to Oregon. A win would have given the Wildcats an automatic berth in the NCAA Tournament. Instead, their fate was left in the hands of the selection committee.
“A lot of guys were really down after that game,” Hale said. “I said to get your heads up. I said we're a deserving team. The committee will see this; they'll see what we've done. They'll see our last 10 games. They’ll see how well we played in this tournament against really good teams in our conference.”
Arizona coach Chip Hale on the Wildcats making it into the NCAA Tournament in the final regional bracket revealed Monday (video by Michael Lev / Arizona Daily Star)
Hale was right. The committee credited Arizona for the way it finished the season, winning seven of its last nine games to boost its RPI to No. 45. That stretch included a pair of victories over No. 8 national seed Stanford and one over Oregon State, one of the Pac-12’s three other at-large entrants.
It also included a series victory over USC and wins over Arizona State and UC Irvine. None of those teams made the field of 64, which included 10 teams from the SEC (which grabbed half of the 16 host spots) and eight from the ACC. The Big 12 placed six teams in the tournament, the Pac-12 five.
“USC and ASU, for me, were definitely deserving teams to get in,” Hale said. “Obviously, we wanted to get in, so we're happy. But we're disappointed for our conference not to get those teams in also.”
The Trojans finished fourth in the regular season in the Pac-12 with a 17-13 league record. The Sun Devils were fifth at 16-13. Arizona was eighth at 12-18.
But the committee looks at all games against conference opponents. Factoring in the Pac-12 Tournament and a midweek win over ASU, the UA’s aggregate league record climbs to 16-19. The Wildcats advanced to the Pac-12 Tournament final, while the Trojans and Sun Devils didn’t make it out of pool play.
Looking at the head-to-head matchups between Arizona and ASU — which was one of the first four teams out, along with UCI — the Sun Devils swept the Wildcats in a three-game series in Phoenix in late March. But Arizona beat ASU by scores of 20-0 and 12-3 in two subsequent meetings.
“Those last two games they played against Arizona State — and that’s not what you’re basing the entire decision on, it’s just a piece of it — were really impressive,” John Cohen, chair of the NCAA Division I Baseball Committee, told reporters during a conference call Monday. “Those two games, and I can’t remember the scoring margin, but it was significant, maybe 30-3 or something like that.
Arizona’s players gather for a huddle before the start of Saturday’s game against Oregon. UA will face TCU in Fayetteville, Arkansas, on Friday night.
“They take two out of three from USC, and they beat a very solid Irvine team and Stanford as well. On our rep calls, too, the representative from the Pac said this is a team — we had three meetings — and they just said this is a team you do not want to play and ranked Arizona higher than where they were in the league at that time.
“And they just kept pressing forward and playing better. The way they were playing and when they were playing their best, especially in the last quarter of that season, I think the committee felt like they were deserving.”
Cohen noted during the ESPN2 broadcast that Arizona had the fifth-best RPI in the Pac-12 — higher than ASU (52) and USC (53). That metric clearly played a significant role in many of the committee’s decisions.
UCI landed at No. 49 in RPI, went 19-6 on the road and had an 8-1 record against Pac-12 teams, including 5-0 vs. USC and ASU. But the Anteaters ended up with only one Quad 1 result — a 4-3 loss to Arizona — after the Trojans and Sun Devils fell out of the top 50 in RPI.
“That committee has such a hard job to do,” Hale said. “Obviously, they went very heavy on the RPI this year. And I think that's what helped us a lot.”
