Don't toss the Huskies into the NCAA Tournament doghouse

By Blake Twisselman

March has arrived in all of its glory and I've started to prepare myself for madness.

In the next 10 days, there will be enough basketball on TV to make my head spin, as all 31 Division I conferences wrap up their tourneys and crown their "representative" for the Big Dance. The tournament selection committee will then be left with the thankless task of choosing 34 more teams to round out the field of 65. Oh, how the bubbles will burst.

As selection committee chairman Bob Bowlsby and friends huddle in a war room and rack their brains over RPIs, schedule strengths, conference quality and other criteria, I plead with them to do just one thing: throw the Dawgs a bone.

The University of Washington men's basketball team might not have the prettiest RPI ranking or the toughest strength of schedule, but Washington deserves to dance this March. The Dawgs have showcased some of the best basketball in the nation over the past month and a half, climbing all the way from 10th place to second place in the Pac-10 Conference in the last 10 weeks.

On Jan. 15, the Huskies suffered a 10-point loss to the Oregon Ducks and the season looked bleak, if not almost over, as Washington's record fell to 0-5 in conference.

Head Coach Lorenzo Romar must have given the team one of those old-fashioned, Knute Rockne-like speeches because Washington has since won 10 of its last 12 ballgames including 10 of its last 11 conference match-ups.

They took down Oregon, crushed USC and almost pulled off a road upset against a quality North Carolina State team in Raleigh, N.C. More importantly, the Huskies swept Arizona (who is considered a lock for the tourney), jumping them ahead of the Wildcats for second place in the conference standings. The Dawgs have played so well in recent weeks that they have emerged from nowhere and moved into the limelight as one of the nation's "bubble teams."

This leads me back to the war room, where Bob Bowlsby and company have to weed through all of these qualified teams and choose the top 34 who will be offered at-large bids to the coveted NCAA Tournament.

I know exactly what is going to happen when the committee analyzes Washington's portfolio.

RPI: not that good. The Huskies had an RPI in the mid-90s last week and no team has ever earned an at-large bid with an RPI that high.

Strength of schedule: not great. Washington scheduled non-conference games against Gonzaga and North Carolina State, but it is no secret that the Pac-10 is having a down year as a conference. The Pac-10 usually gets four to six teams in the big dance, but all of the analysts have projected that they will get in only two teams this year.

However, RPI and strength of schedule don't account for momentum.

Greater emphasis should be placed on how a team has played in their last 10 or 15 games, because those last games will serve as an accurate indicator of how the team will compete in the tournament. I don't care if a team struggled in November, December or even early January because the complexion of a team can change drastically in that time.

What should matter is how a team is playing now, and the Dawgs, right now, are playing almost better than anyone. Nobody in the nation would want to take on these red-hot Huskies in a first-round tournament game.

So on March 14, when Mr. Bowlsby announces the men's tournament brackets, I simply ask him to consider the following. You can refer to all of your fancy computer-generated data, but don't let it become the deciding factor for evaluating teams. The way a team is playing is a superior tool of judgment to indexes and ratings because ultimately, momentum means everything in March.

û Contact Blake Twisselman at (408) 554-4852 or jtwisselman@scu.edu.