The NCAA Baseball Chairman Was Asked Why Alabama Made the Tournament and He Proceeded to Give a Lesson in Making Up Bullshit on the Fly

Heading into Monday's NCAA Baseball Tournament Selection Show, Alabama was as firmly on the bubble as any team possibly could be. The Tide finished the regular season 12-17 in SEC play before securing wins over No. 24 South Carolina and No. 4 Tennessee in the SEC Tournament, which apparently pushed them over the edge to sneak into the field.

So surely when NCAA Tournament Chairman Jeff Altier was asked why Bama made the field over teams like Georgia or Pittsburgh, he would have some numbers ready to back up the committee's decision, right? Well, kind of.

Altier did stumble through enough words to finally spit out the Tide's strength of schedule — Bama played the second-toughest slate in the country — but that's about as far as he got before he started looking off-camera and panicking trying to think of some other reason he could come up with. And there were other figures he could have cited that would have made the decision look defensible. Namely, Bama was No. 31 in RPI and every team in the top 40 made the field. You gotta have at least ONE more number ready to go other than strength of schedule and the fact they play in the SEC.

But I'm not even sure the committee got that far down the list before they just decided Alabama was in. The SEC is undoubtedly the best conference in the country and has all the top teams, but a situation like this is one where I can see why someone who hates the SEC would get upset. This guy very clearly has no explanation for why Bama got in over Pitt or Georgia.

So congrats to Bama on making the NCAA Tournament, even if nobody can exactly explain why.