CBI Bound?

By Kartik Krishnaiyer
Canes Rising Staff

It's simply assumed by most Miami fans that not making the NCAA Tournament means the Canes will get an NIT invite. Despite the active lobbying from ESPN's commentators who have a vested interest in getting as many ACC teams as possible into the Big Dance, Miami's NCAA hopes are almost 100% dead.

The Canes would have to win out and then win their first ACC Tournament game to lock down an NCAA bid. For a team that finds interesting and creative ways to lose games in the last minutes and overtime, winning five games in a row, three of which will be away from home is impossible.

The NIT too may be a stretch. With the new NCAA selection rules, the NIT must take regular season conference winners that did not win their league tournaments. A year ago Wake Forest won seven ACC games and beat Duke but was denied an NIT bid. This year Miami is sitting on four league wins with four games remaining. The Canes are likely to lose at Virginia, thus making it almost imperative Miami wins the other three games to make the NIT. That would leave Miami forced to decide whether to accept an invite to the third tier College Basketball Invitational. Last year, snubbed by the NIT Wake Forest declined a CBI invite.

Boston College a team that has won three more league games than Miami comes to Coral Gables tomorrow. That is followed up by a trip Charlottesville to face a red hot UVA team that beat Clemson last week, and Va Tech the other night. Miami faces a bad Ga Tech team in Atlanta before coming home to face an NC State team that right now is playing much better basketball than the Canes.

Andy Katz, Joe Lunardi and Dick Vitale seem to think Miami deserves NCAA consideration for losing a number of close games to allegedly good ACC teams. But the fact that Miami couldn't even pull out one of these games against better opposition tells me the Canes are not NCAA worthy even if the team wins its last four games of the regular season, which I believe is HIGHLY unlikely.

For the Canes to make the NCAAs in my book, they need to win at least three of these final for regular season games and then win at least two games in the ACC Tournament. Winning two games based on Miami's current league position with require the Hurricanes to beat either North Carolina, Duke or Wake Forest in the second round of the tournament. A win over one of those teams on a neutral site would make UM NCAA worthy. Anything less will not.

The Hurricanes have a losing mentality right now evidenced by a terrible second half performance against a young but well coached FSU team this other night. I believe Frank Haith will need to make some changes in the offseason to make this program successful again in the ACC: playing top teams close simply isn't good enough to get the program to its potential level. But we'll discuss the neccesary changes at the end of the season.