NDSU waiting for its own March Madness
The NDSU men’s basketball team beat Marquette this season. It lost to Texas Tech by four points.
Both of those teams were in the national spotlight last weekend when they played in the NCAA tournament.
Most of the Bison watched from the comfort of their own homes. To the dismay of the team, NDSU won’t be able to even have a chance to play in the big dance until the 2008-09 season.
That will be when the prison sentence, AKA the NCAA reclassification penalty, will expire and the Bison will be eligible for postseason play.
Much like the team, the campus will be starving for NDSU’s ticket to the tournament by that time.
If NDSU students thought the campus was buzzing after the Bison almost beat the University of Minnesota in football last season, it will be a different world when NDSU has a chance to qualify for the NCAA tournament.
It isn’t too far of a fetch for NDSU to qualify for the NCAA tournament in 2009, either. The team will have to win the Mid-Continent Conference tournament to receive an automatic-bid.
By that time, though, the team might even be the favorite to win the Mid-Con tournament.
As a mid-major conference, there is a lot of parity with the Mid-Con teams.
In the past seven seasons, five different teams have won the Mid-Con tournament and earned an automatic-bid to the NCAA tournament.
Over the past two seasons, NDSU had a record of 6-3 against teams that will be in the Mid-Con next season. This season, only three Mid-Con teams had a conference record of over .500.
Valparaiso was one of those teams, and they will be leaving the Mid-Con to join the Horizon League on July 1.
Two Mid-Con teams, Western Illinois and Centenary, only won three conference games.
NDSU will enter the conference next season after posting a 20-8 record, the first time the program has had a 20-win season since it became a Division I team.
When NDSU becomes eligible for the NCAA tournament in 2009, Ben Woodside, Brett Winkelman and Mike Nelson, who each averaged over 15 points per game this season, will all be seniors.
Oral Roberts, who has won the conference tournament two years in a row, will graduate four of its top five leading scorers from this season by that time.
Maybe it isn’t a terrible thing that the Bison aren’t eligible next season, though.
The crew of juniors-to-be will have an entire season of conference play under their belts by the time 2008-09 comes around and definitely be accustomed to the play of the conference.
While NDSU players may be bumming that their seasons are over this year and the next without any postseason play, you can be sure that they are watching those games imagining themselves out on the court, with an entire campus of support behind them.