When the 2008 NAIA men’s national basketball tournament brackets were released on Tuesday night, a great injustice was done to the Montana State University-Northern Lights. Actually, the Lights have been part of a great injustice all season long as it relates to respect on the NAIA level. The NAIA tournament, which begins on March 19 in Kansas City, will feature just two teams from the Frontier Conference. Lewis-Clark State earned the league’s automatic bid by beating MSU-N 65-63 last Saturday in the championship game of the conference tournament in Butte. And the Carroll College Saints were the only other team in the league to receive an at-large berth, and that’s where the controversy surrounding Northern begins. The Lights, along with Carroll, LC State and Westminster College, all finished with identical 10-4 records in conference play, and all four teams finished the season with better than 20 wins. But no one played less total games this season than the Lights, and yet MSU-N managed to keep pace and actually finish better than several of those teams. And while LC State punched its ticket to the NAIA’s big dance by earning the automatic bid, Northern did just as much and has as big a case to be in the field of 32 as any of the other at-large teams. The Lights had just one bad weekend in conference play, a tough road trip at Carroll and at Rocky Mountain College. Of MSU-N’s four league losses, it didn’t lose to anyone outside the top five. The Saints and Warriors can’t say the same. Northern also went undefeated on its home court, and no one had more Top 25 wins than the Lights. In fact it wasn’t even close. The Lights beat Carroll twice, and both times the Saints were ranked in the NAIA poll. No r t h e r n a l s o swept Westminster and LC State at home when both teams were ranked inside the top 15, a n d f o r g o o d measure, the Lights also beat RMC when the Bears were a ranked team as wel l . Al l qual i ty wins, and al l seemingly forgotten by the powers that be that rank teams. Northern also finished the season as strong as anybody, winning seven straight games before the Lights lost to LC State on Saturday. And five of the last seven games the Lights won were away from Havre. But none of that seemed to matter to the Frontier Conference rater, or the rest of the nation for that matter. See, the NAIA tournament is picked in a peculiar manner in which a teams fate is in the hands, first of the conference’s designated voter, and then the rest of the league's voters around the country. The NAIA tournament field consists of 32 teams broken down by 16 automatic qualifiers, one independent qualifier and 15 at-large bids. That’s not unlike the upcoming NCAA tournament, except for how the at-large teams are chosen. There’s no committee that gets together and compares one team to another, because i f there was, Northern’s body of work would, at the very least, compare very favorably with Carroll’s. There is also no RPI, computer polls or strength of schedule to go on, and obviously, how a team plays in the conference tournament carries no weight on the national tournament, because again, if it did, the Lights wouldn’t be sitting at home next week. Instead, the last 15 teams are taken from where they are ranked in the final NAIA Top 25, a poll that is released before the conference tournament’s begin. And that poll, didn’t feature the Lights in the Top 25, despite the fact that they just captured a share of the league crown, were on a five-game winning streak, and recently swept two of the so-called best teams in the nation. And all season long, the NAIA poll was a detriment to Northern’s progress. The Lights were ranked just once all season, and the week they beat LC State and Westminster, they were still mired deep in the others receiving votes category. No matter who Northern beat and how impressive the Lights were playing, it never mattered to the Frontier’s rater, and in the final week of the season, somehow Carroll moved ahead of MSU-N and into the national tournament. And all the Lights did was go out and soundly defeat the Saints days later in the conference semifinals. No, Northern’s fate was only in its hands on Saturday night when the Lights came within two points of earning the automatic bid. But just because the Lights didn’t quite close that deal, they shouldn’t be left out of the tournament. In fact, Northern did everything right this season, winning at home, winning on the road, beating ranked opponents, winning close games, and staying in the conference title hunt. But none of that mattered to the powers that be, and because of that, and an obviously faulty system for selecting the national tournament field, one of the 32 best teams in the country won’t get a chance to play in Kansas City, and that means that the careers of great players like Delvaughn Tinned and Drew Pettersen are now over. And it also means that the hard work and dedication of a good basketball team has been shunned by people who don’t seem to know any better. And if there’s a greater injustice in the basketball world, I haven’t seen or heard of it.
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