No. 20 Miami (OH) men’s basketball’s undefeated season ended Thursday at Rocket Arena in Cleveland, as the RedHawks fell 87-83 to UMass in the quarterfinal round of the Mid-American Conference (MAC) Tournament.
Miami entered the game as the only remaining undefeated team in the country.
The MAC is traditionally a one-bid conference, with the tournament champion being the only team with a guaranteed bid to the NCAA Tournament.
But the RedHawks believe they have earned an at-large bid to the tournament and deserve to be one of 68 teams playing for a national championship, even though they did not earn an automatic bid.
“I told our group, ‘You know, listen, our journey’s still going to continue. This isn’t the end of it.’ It’s not the goal and not what we wanted to do, obviously,” Miami head coach Travis Steele said. “One of our goals was to win the MAC Tournament Championship, and unfortunately, we’re not going to be able to do that because we couldn’t get past UMass.”
However, the decision ultimately comes down to the committee and their decision in three days on Selection Sunday.
“I can’t control what I can’t control; that’s what coach always says,” senior guard Peter Suder, the MAC Player of the Year, said.
The MAC has not received two bids to March Madness since 1999.
“We’ve created a bad system,” UMass head coach Frank Martin said. “Why? All our teams in our league were all assigned a number before the season started, those metric numbers that are assigned to us. How do we ever change those numbers if we can’t play the teams that are assigned the number 20 to start the season because they’re not going to schedule us.”
But Steele and the RedHawks have support from much of the conference, including the foes who handed them their lone defeat.
“It’d be an embarrassment, a complete embarrassment if this league doesn’t get two teams in; this league’s too good,” Martin said. “I’ve coached in Conference USA, Big East, name the league, I’ve been in it, and the top two teams in this league are as good as anyone in some of those leagues that I just mentioned. It’d be a complete embarrassment if that doesn’t happen.”
Toledo head coach Tod Kowalczyk also offered his support for the RedHawks after the Rockets defeating the Falcons to advance to the semifinals.
“Nobody in the history of college basketball deserves to get in the tournament more than them,” Kowalczyk said. “Anybody that would argue that—I hate to say this about anybody—but I really would question their intelligence.”
Miami will find out their fate on Sunday at 6 p.m., when the bracket is revealed on CBS.
