Indiana Misses NCAA Tournament For Second Straight Season

The Hoosiers fell just short of an NCAA Tournament bid after going 19-13 and losing their first Big Ten Tournament game.

Indiana coach Mike Woodson against Purdue at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall. / Rich Janzaruk/Herald-Times / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Indiana’s hopes turned into disappointment Sunday as it failed to make the NCAA Tournament.

The Hoosiers have missed the tournament for a second straight season after finishing 19-13 in coach Mike Woodson’s fourth season. Indiana lost 72-59 to Oregon Thursday in the Big Ten Tournament, putting it right on the cut line. 

Indiana was the second team out, behind West Virginia. North Carolina was the last team in, followed by San Diego State, Xavier and Texas.

There are other postseason tournaments like the College Basketball Crown and the NIT, though Indiana will not play in either one. Indiana declined a bid to the NIT last season, it has already begun searching for a new coach to replace Woodson and the transfer portal opens March 24.

On the CBS selection show, analyst Seth Davis disagreed with the decision to leave Indiana out.

"I had Indiana and West Virginia in over North Carolina and Xavier," Davis said. "I gotta say, Indiana is the one that sticks out to me. They had a win at Michigan State, home against Purdue, 4-13 in Quad 1. So more than Carolina, and unlike Carolina – North Carolina also had a Quad 3 loss at home to Stanford. Indiana did not have any losses outside of Quad 1, so I'm curious to hear the reasoning. I mean, North Carolina had a great nonconference strength of schedule, terrific in the metrics, but the bottom line is only one Quad 1 win to Indiana's four. Carolina had a Quad 3 loss. Indiana didn't have any losses outside Quad 1."

Throughout the weekend, Indiana moved between the “last four in” and “first four out,” according to various bracketologists. Shortly before the selection show, Indiana was projected to make the tournament by 90 of 111 bracketologists on bracketmatrix.com. But it fell two spots short, the selection committee explained during Sunday’s show.

Davis asked Bubba Cunningham, who is the athletic director at North Carolina and the chairman of the NCAA men's basketball selection sommittee, if North Carolina got an advantage because its AD is the chairman.

"Obviously I'm going to defer that to Keith [Gill], but all the policies and procedures were followed," Cunningham said. "And Keith can address exactly how North Carolina was discussed because I was not in the room for any of that."

"As the vice chair," Keith Gill said. "I managed all the conversations that we had about North Carolina, and we had quite a few. Our policies require the AD of any school to recuse themselves and actually leave the room for any of those discussions, and they're not allowed to participate in any vote as well. So we follow those, had lots of discussions about North Carolina."

"Saturday night, we took our final vote and we voted four teams in the field on Saturday night, and we had a contingency vote. The contingency vote, that was the last team in the field, and it was based on Memphis and UAB. If Memphis won that game, then that was going to free up a spot in the tournament, and that was going to be North Carolina. If UAB had won, then Memphis was gonna be in the tournament, UAB would have been in the tournament and North Carolina would have been the first team out. So that process played out today, Memphis won, and that put North Carolina in the field."

Clark Kellogg asked about the discussion around the teams that ended up being left out.

"We had a lot of metrics, and we added a couple this year. We added Torvik, we added the [wins above bubble], and those were the ones that were discussed frequently," Cunningham said. "All of the predictive metrics, the results-based metrics, have been around quite some time, so we used a few additional ones. But you're right, the last four teams that were out, it was a tough call. The next team out was West Virginia, and they had an outstanding year and unfortunately Tucker DeVries was hurt and player availability is something we talk about quite a bit. Indiana was close, Ohio State was close, Boise was close, and we had a lot of conversations about those teams as well. But yeah, as I said on the onset here, that's that hardest part of being on the committee, having to draw that line. But with only one real upset this year, there were an awful lot of teams on the bubble that got in. And last year, as you guys all know, we had five, so we couldn't go very deep into that pool."

Indiana made a late-season push for the NCAA Tournament by winning five of its last seven regular season games, including big wins over Michigan State and Purdue. But that wasn’t enough to overcome a rough stretch of seven losses in eight games during the middle of conference play, along with zero notable wins in nonconference play.

Close losses to Maryland, Purdue, Michigan and UCLA came back to haunt the Hoosiers, who believed they were hitting their stride at the right time but ultimately missed the tournament again.

“We're playing some of our best basketball,” Woodson said after Thursday’s loss to Oregon. “I don't think that there's a team in the country that we can't beat if we come ready to play and compete for 40 minutes. We've had a lot of dry spots this season, but here of late we've been playing some pretty good basketball. I don't think today's game is an indication of how we've been playing the last two and a half, three weeks."

Plenty of changes are coming to the program, with Woodson stepping down, nine seniors on the roster and a new coach taking over soon.