NCAA Tournament Resume: Boynton, Self Emphatic About Oklahoma State’s Chances

After avoiding Kansas’ first three-game sweep in 35 years on Thursday afternoon, Bill Self grabbed the microphone and spoke into it about Oklahoma State’s NCAA Tournament chances.

“I’m biased, because they played us better than anybody has all year, twice, and I think they’re without question a tournament team,” said Self.

“I look at the things the pundits put up there, the blind resumes, whatever. Surely how you have played down the stretch and those sorts of things matter. In our league if you go 6-4 down the stretch you’ve played well considering all 10 games are monster games. So I don’t think there is any doubt Mike and his team deserve to be in, and I would be very disappointed if they’re not.”

Wouldn’t we all.

Boynton grabbed the same microphone and dropped it after his final petition to the committee. I’m basically just posting the whole transcript because it’s so good.

“Sometimes I think people try to bring arbitrary numbers into the equation to justify, again, back in October they weren’t supposed to be any good,” said Boynton. “‘So let’s figure out how they can still not be any good even though we watched them play and they were pretty good. So let’s talk about the nonconference strength of schedule.’

“Well, we scheduled a game against Pittsburgh two years ago when they were a top-25 team every year, and then they had the worst year in the history of their program. That is bad luck and I don’t think they will ever have a bad of season ever again.

“We played a Charlotte team who is usually in the top 150. They fired their coach three games after we played them. They fired their coach. So those are things outside of your control that when we scheduled those games it was within mind that those are quality opponents that you’re going to play and all of the sudden they turn into ‘bad games,’ ‘bad scheduling.’

“Since when has Pittsburgh been a bad game to schedule? First time ever! We just happened to play them this year. If you just look at our team, watch us play. We have beaten the best teams that we’ve played all year and that should count for something.”

OSU’s resume will be a lightning rod on Sunday, no matter the outcome. They’re either going to be the lowest-rated RPI team to ever get into the tournament or have one of the more ridiculous snubs in recent memory. That’s where we’re at with them as of Thursday evening.

Boynton wasn’t done, though.

“We had a guy who came into our program after it was down for a couple of years who was essentially going to be the guy to save the program and resurrect it,” said Boynton of Brad Underwood. “We had some good success with some really good players last year, and he left and they hired me and nobody in this room knew who I was. That’s the truth.

“So you’ve got a program that looks like it’s unstable, and you’ve got a guy who has never been a head coach before, coaching it. No way they’re going to be good. No way they can win eight games in the Big 12. If they can finish 11th, they will do that. We finished with the 6th best record in the best league in America.

“And so instead of accepting that as truth because that’s what happened, we say, ‘well, they played Pittsburgh who lost every game in the ACC.’ Well, it’s never going to happen again. So, again, it’s confirmation bias in some ways that people just can’t accept what they see because then it invalidates what they said a long time ago.

“Humility, it’s okay. We can be wrong every now and then. Our team competed really well. We dismissed two guys mid-year. We went the next game and beat a top-20 team on the road. NCAA tournament teams do that, figure out a way to go have success even with all the distractions, and we had a lot of them. There was a little investigation going on. We happened to be part of that. Our kids … had every reason in the world not to compete the way they did. It goes to show the character of the people in that locker room, and I’m really proud to be their coach.”

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