It ain’t over till it’s over.
The bid thief: every basement team’s dream and every bubble team’s nightmare.
When surefire at-large teams lose their conference tourneys to teams destined for the NIT at best, the conference cheers as they get another team in, and the bubble teams groan—because for each bid thief that punches a ticket, a bubble gets popped.
Last season, Oregon and NC State went on miraculous runs through the Pac-12 and ACC tournaments to clinch bids that would have gone to the First Two Out. Duquesne, UAB, and Drake also did the same in smaller leagues that snubbed more at-larges.
NC State, of course, went on to be one of the most famous bid thieves in college basketball history by taking their run all the way to the Final Four.
Sometimes, a bid thief isn’t that surprising in a conference like the Atlantic 10 or the Missouri Valley.
But other times, a team comes completely out of the blue and crashes the party from the Southeastern Conference itself.
That’s exactly what happened in 2008 for the Georgia Bulldogs, who came into the SEC Tournament 13-16 and with a conference record of just 4-12 — tied with Auburn for the worst in the conference.
After squeaking out a two-point win in overtime against Ole Miss in the first round of the then-12 team SEC, the Dawgs were preparing for their Friday night matchup against Kentucky when a tornado hit the Georgia Dome during the overtime period of the Mississippi State – Alabama game, causing the rest of the tournament to be moved to Georgia Tech’s much smaller arena a few miles away.
Whether the location change helped Georgia or not, I don’t know, but they stunned UK in overtime and reached the semifinals, where they won by four against Mississippi State and were playing Arkansas in the championship game for a ticket to the Big Dance while touting a 16-16 record.
A couple of hours later, they had done the impossible and won the SEC Tournament over the Hogs by nine, entering the Dance at 17-16 with a 14-seed, the lowest seed ever given to a power-conference school.
Who will be the next great bid thief from the SEC? There frankly wasn’t any chance of one emerging this year: South Carolina and LSU were the only candidates and they didn’t come close to getting to even play Auburn, Alabama, Florida, etc. But perhaps one of these years, it’ll happen again.
It’s definitely not easy in an extremely deep league, but don’t ever tell a team it’s over before it’s over.