March 11, 2007

Jim Lamar, Osceola

A year ago, Florida State coach Leonard Hamilton felt the sting of what he viewed as a snub by the NCAA tournament selection committee.

A year later -- and less than an hour after learning that his Seminoles were once again left out of the tournament -- Hamilton said his program has learned a painful lesson. For the third time in four seasons, FSU will play in the National Invitation Tournament. The Seminoles play host to Toledo on Tuesday at 6 p.m.

"It's easy for me to voice all my frustrations at the committee and point to other teams who got in," Hamilton said. "But I realize it's all on us and what we do if we want to make the NCAA tournament. We can't rely on the committee and the strength of schedule and the strength of our league. We have to put it in a position that there are no doubts we belong. . . . We've got to find a way to put ourselves on the other side."

Despite passionate protests by national television analysts Dick Vitale and Jay Bilas, the Seminoles find themselves missing from the NCAA bracket as teams like Stanford, Arkansas, Purdue, Old Dominion and Xavier were awarded at-large bids.

If he wanted to torture himself, Hamilton could probably spend hours today pointing out areas in which his team out-performed tournament teams in what are considered key areas for invitations. FSU and Georgia are the only two teams with winning records and with strength of schedule ratings higher than 20 that did not earn NCAA bids.

When compared to at-large teams Old Dominion, Stanford, Purdue, Illinois, Xavier and Southern Cal, FSU had more wins against top-25 teams in the RPI than any of them but Southern Cal (tied with four) and had a stronger strength of schedule than all of them. The Seminoles are also the only team in that group that did not have a single loss to a team outside of the top-50 in the RPI.

Ten of FSU's 12 losses this season came to NCAA tournament teams; the other two came to NIT participant Clemson, ranked 46th in the RPI. But those losses apparently were all that mattered to the selection committee, which didn't award a bid to a team that went 7-9 in conference play and went 1-5 during a crucial six-game stretch with starting point guard Toney Douglas on the bench with a broken hand.

"Last year, the regular season standings didn't seem to matter as much," Hamilton said. "The strength of schedule was a negative. I look at Xavier with a strength of schedule of 82 . . . I don't know, I'm sure some of the other teams were deserving, but it's hard to understand what all the criteria are.

"It's obvious 9-7 is not good enough and 7-9 is not good enough. We have to become a much better program and a much better team and take away the opportunities where we might be excluded."

Hamilton said he had no doubt that five straight losses during Douglas' injury ultimately killed FSU's tourney hopes. But he pointed to his own program for not making the necessary adjustments during that losing skid.

"I'm extremely disappointed that we did not handle that situation better," he said.

Hamilton also pointed to a home loss to Clemson back in January as the type of game that bit his team on Sunday.

"When we go back and evaluate the season and look at that first game at home against Clemson where we didn't play well -- you can't ever let that happen," Hamilton said. "We faltered there and we were our own worst enemy. It's obvious those things that you can control, you need to control. That's what I'm taking away from this scenario. You can't leave yourself open to any kind of mix-up. We've got to improve the depth of our team at all positions. We can't look for a sympathy vote because of injury. I got surprised a little bit -- I was not expecting to lose both AJ and Jon Kreft. But we need to prepare for those scenarios as well. We have to have a plan that we can be a little more effective in using when we have injuries come up.

"Then I think, should we have changed [when Douglas was injured]? I thought we could continue to run the same system. I thought we had all of the bases covered, but it's obvious we need to be as prepared as possible to be ready for all situations."

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