North Florida's NCAA tournament fate rests in another team's hands
A pair of upsets in Thursday's Atlantic Sun semifinals has created an unusual scenario for Sunday night's title game.
North Florida's NCAA tournament hopes now rest on the outcome of a game in which they're not even playing.
Fourth-seeded Florida Gulf Coast and seventh-seeded Stetson will meet in the Atlantic Sun championship game after the Eagles ousted top-seeded North Florida and the Hatters toppled sixth-seeded Lipscomb. Stetson is participating in the Atlantic Sun tournament even though it is ineligible to play in March Madness this year after falling one point shy of clearing the NCAA's minimum Academic Progress Report threshold.
If Florida Gulf Coast wins Sunday's title game, it will receive the Atlantic Sun's automatic NCAA tournament bid and North Florida will go to the NIT. If Stetson pulls a third straight upset, the automatic NCAA bid will go to North Florida by virtue of the Ospreys' Atlantic Sun regular season title.
So will North Florida coach Matthew Driscoll don a Stetson cap and T-shirt and camp out in front of his TV for Sunday night's title game? He told Yahoo Sports late Thursday night that nothing could be further from the truth.
Driscoll insists he won't even watch Sunday's title game because he has no control over the outcome. He'll instead prepare as though his team is NIT-bound until he hears otherwise.
"Whatever occurs on Sunday is out of my hands," Driscoll said. "I can't control anything that happens in that game. To live vicariously is not something I was ever taught in my life and I don't want to become one of those people. I wouldn't enjoy the game. I wouldn't watch it if it didn't have these ramifications, so I'm not going to vicariously live out every second."
It's maddening for Driscoll that his team no longer controls its own destiny because North Florida has been the Atlantic Sun's best team all season. The Ospreys (22-11, 10-4) won the league title by two games, their second straight outright regular season championship.
When North Florida opened a nine-point first-half lead in front of a roaring home crowd on Thursday night, it appeared the Ospreys would have little trouble advancing to Sunday's title game. Instead Florida Gulf Coast stormed back behind the scoring of Marc Eddy Norelia and guards Zach Johnson and Christian Terrell, taking a 14-point lead at halftime and putting the game away early in the second half en route to an 89-56 rout.
"We started off great, we were up nine and then we missed 16 of our next 17 threes," Driscoll said. "It was almost like our offense was dictating our defense. We scored the first possession of the second half to cut it to 12, and I really felt like at that point that it wasn't the end of the world. The next thing I knew it was 25 like that."
Florida Gulf Coast (19-13) is one win away from its first NCAA tournament bid since its stunning 2013 Sweet 16 run, but this year's Eagles bear little resemblance to Andy Enfield's high-octane Dunk City squad. Out of the 351 teams in Division I, Florida Gulf Coast is 247th in tempo.
In two games against Stetson this season, Florida Gulf won by 29 at home on Jan. 9 and lost by seven on the road in its regular season finale. Sunday's rubber game will have far more at stake for the Hatters, the Eagles and for North Florida.
When other leagues have allowed an postseason-ineligible team to compete in their conference tournament, they've sometimes mandated that if that team wins, its title game opponent is the recipient of the automatic NCAA tournament bid. Driscoll favors the Atlantic Sun's approach of rewarding the regular season champ, and not just because it could benefit his team on Sunday night.
"Let's say they reseeded and Lipscomb beat Florida Gulf Coast tonight," Driscoll said. "Now you've got two teams that are 12-20 in the title game and Lipscomb's going to go. Does it make sense to reward the sixth-place team because of this scenario or do we go back and reward who had the best longevity over the course of the year?"
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Jeff Eisenberg is the editor of The Dagger on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at daggerblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
