AU HOOPS: Lebo still fuming over NCAA snub

Almost three months after he felt his team was slighted in missing the NCAA tournament, Jeff Lebo hasn’t had a change of heart.

Lebo, along with the rest of the SEC’s coaches, had a front-row seat for commissioner Mike Slive’s lecture of sorts at last month’s spring meetings in Destin, Fla. The message: Toughen up your non-conference schedule so more than three SEC teams make the NCAA Tournament’s field of 65.

With all due respect, Lebo begged to differ.

“I’m not so sure that it was poor scheduling,” Lebo said Thursday from his office in Beard-Eaves-Memorial Coliseum. “It’s kind of potluck.”

Auburn, which finished second in the SEC West after winning eight of its final nine games, was relegated to NIT duty. Its 22 wins at the time the selection committee made its decision simply weren’t enough to overcome a poor RPI (63).

The Tigers would finish with 24 wins, the third most in program history.

Why that RPI was so high, though, merits more than a one-way discussion, Lebo said.

Slive, who also served as the head of the selection committee, did not address the SEC specifically in a TV interview following the selection show, but said the committee looks at “teams,” not conferences. He also stressed the importance of an entire “body of work,” something Auburn may have lacked in the eyes of judges because of its slow start to the season.

He reaffirmed that point at the May meetings.

“November and December isn’t exhibition season,” Slive said.

Lebo admits that Auburn’s non-conference slate was far from glowing, saying that it likely fell in the middle of the pack among SEC teams.

But it was more a cause of circumstance rather than intent, he said.

When Lebo added George Washington to the 2008-09 schedule, he thought he had a premier game lined up against a premier team. The Colonials, who had made the NCAA Tournament three of the previous four seasons, finished the season 10-18 with an RPI of 203.

So the Tigers’ 83-71 victory over the Colonials was rendered all but meaningless. Same went for Auburn’s season-opening victory over Missouri State, who was also an elite mid-major a few years back. Missouri State finished with an RPI of 212.

“You have to do the best you can,” Lebo said. “Try to stay away as best as you can from the bottom bottom. And that’s hard.”

But even though the Tigers’ schedule didn’t pan out the way Lebo expected, they could have done better work with it.

Auburn’s slow start, which featured losses to Mercer at home and Northern Iowa on a neutral court and a near-miss against a strong Dayton team, translated into a poor RPI heading into conference play. And because the SEC’s overall RPI was poor itself, the Tigers had a tough time rebuilding their reputation during the conference season.

That’s because the SEC placed only three teams in the tournament for just the second time since the field was expanded in 1985. From 1996-2008, the SEC placed at least five teams.
LSU, the regular-season champion, received the highest placement of the lot — an 8-seed. Tennessee, which finished with the fourth-strongest strength of schedule in the nation and won the SEC East, was a 9-seed.

“I think that our biggest thing from coaches is trying to figure out what they’re looking for,” Lebo said. “Each committee each year, it’s something different.

“One year, it’s the last 12 games are the most important. The next year it’s the complete body of work. We’re trying to hit sometimes a moving target there and each group of NCAA committee members maybe have a different opinion of how they look at teams.”

Lebo said that the upcoming season’s non-conference schedule was largely set before the meetings, so a change in philosophy, if any, won’t be reflected until the following year’s schedule. Lebo said Auburn’s non-conference schedule, which isn’t finalized, will feature games against Virginia, Florida State and Drake.

“Every game is so important now,” Lebo said. “It’s just gigantic.”

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