March Madness: St. John's seeding a major miss for NCAA selection committee
St. John's Zuby Ejiofor and teammates celebrate with the Big East championship trophy after defeating UConn in the Big East men’s basketball tournament final at Madison Square Garden on March 14, 2026. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
If you follow St. John’s, or college basketball in general, this weekend might have given you whiplash.
On Saturday night, the Red Storm completed an overpowering run through the Big East Tournament by absolutely demolishing Connecticut before a sellout crowd at the Garden and a national television audience. On Sunday evening when the NCAA Tournament field was announced, both teams were placed into the East Regional with St. John’s seeded No. 5 and the Huskies at No. 2.
If one is looking for the proper amount of disbelief at this juxtaposed, maybe you witnessed how UConn coach Dan Hurley reacted to a “no-call” right before he got whistled for a technical foul Saturday.
The NCAA Tournament selection committee got this one wrong, from St. John’s placement in the field to giving it a cross-country trip for the subregional in San Diego. After the performance against the Huskies, who would have imagined they’d be the prognosticators’ “dark horse” to make a deep run the following day?
The committee claims to care about how a team will perform in the tourney when it considers seeding. That’s why we hear so much about player injuries and their impact.
Key players have been out with injuries for No. 5 Texas Tech (JT Toppin), No. 6 North Carolina (Caleb Wilson) and No. 7 UCLA (Donovan Dent), and all of them had NCAA Tournament resumes that suggested a higher seeding. No. 3 Gonzaga appears to have fallen a line because Braden Huff has been out since January after knee surgery.
If the selection committee truly cares about how a team will perform in the tourney, shouldn’t it consider how well or poorly it is playing in the Big Dance run-up?
Once upon a time, the committee used to include how a team had played in their final 10 games before Selection Sunday as a seeding factor, but now it’s a team’s “body of work” for the entire season.
Asked Sunday about getting No. 5 after closing the season 19-1 over its last 20 games and laying waste to the field in the Big East Tournament, St. John’s coach Rick Pitino replied, “I don’t think they take that into consideration like the old days, of how you’re playing at the end of the year. They [rely] on the metrics where each game counts [equally].”
The factors that hurt the Red Storm’s placement in the field happened months ago. They lost non-conference games against Iowa State, Alabama and Auburn in November and to Kentucky in December.
Even though the Storm winning 19 of their last 20 moved them into the top 15 in almost all the metrics — results-based as well as predictive — those losses landed them in their current spot, according to NCAA Tournament selection committee chairperson Kevin Gill.
“Certainly we watched the Big East Tournament and certainly took it into account and they played well and certainly that’s a big win over UConn,” he said when asked about the Storm. “But it really is a full body of work. So when we’re thinking about it, we’re looking at how these wins and losses impact a full resume . . . One of the things I would say about St. John’s is their results in the non-conference did not have the same depth and quality as some of the folks that are ahead of them.”
If one followed St. John’s, it’s understood that the team brought in 11 new players — including four starters and two major players in the rotation — and that the team hadn’t jelled yet and teams like Alabama and Iowa State had more returnees.
It’s the era of “Big Data” and the selection committee — and many fans — pay a lot of attention to the metrics, but it has to get back to considering how a team is playing at the end of its season. With so many teams working the NCAA transfer portal to build rosters — more than 1,000 players went in before this season — there are going to be more programs that come on late in the season.
And, yes, we realize that the phrase “player retention” is holding on Line 1.
One could certainly take a position that St. John’s is right where it belongs. The Big East was no powerhouse this season and got just three programs into the Dance. It didn’t win the high-profile non-conference games. A No. 4 seed isn’t so different from a No. 5. And though it won two of three meetings with UConn, the one loss in its last 20 was a 32-point humiliation to the Huskies that got national attention as the Storm missed its last 24 shots.
St. John’s couldn’t have done much more over the last 10 weeks to improve how things unfolded Sunday. It’s a shame it made no difference.
Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.
