COLUMN: Hawks got the NCAA shaft

From Jeff Wieland's "Peanuts and Cracker Jacks," Fall '95 Their hearts were someplace else. Like Baltimore, or Albany, or Salt Lake City, or anywhere NCAA Tournament games are being played this weekend. Penn, Drexel, Temple and Villanova -- the Hawks had beaten them all during the regular season, but it made little difference in the fickle eyes of the NCAA Tournament selection committee. The Big 5 champions would get the Big Apple while city runner-ups would get the Big Dance. It was an odd scene Monday at City Hall as Philadelphia gathered to send this year's darlings off into postseason play. The Hawks knew they would be the odd men out -- the fifth wheel that missed the bandwagon. What they really wanted to know was why. However, there never are any easy answers in the realm of the subjective, only speculation and confusion. The inner workings of the NCAA Tournament eight-member selection committee have become one of the great mysteries of the modern world. If you ask them, they will tell you they use something called the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) in conjunction with ouija boards, lawn darts and everything but common sense to arrive at a list of the top 64 teams in the country. After factoring in the automatic bids which serve the noble purpose of assuring the Murray States of the world a vacation in Florida, the committee puts all of these teams on something called an S-curve which sounds mathematical enough to give the whole process an illusion of credibility. The committee must have given the lawn darts more weight this year because on the RPI scale, St. Joe's ranked 41st -- better than eight teams who received at-large bids ahead of the Hawks. And even if the Big 5 title doesn't anymore mean what it once did, it sure as hell ought to mean more than the MEAC or MAAC championships, which were good enough to put North Carolina A&T; and St. Peter's in the tourney field. The Dick Vitale theory is the committee was trying to reward the little guy who bucked the odds and turned in an extraordinary season -- which is the only possible explanation for Manhattan and Santa Clara each receiving one of the 35 available at-large bids. But if the NCAA has really committed itself to putting "the best 64 teams in the Tournament," there should beEno place for feel-good picks. And even if the committee was tipping the selection scales toward intangibles, it still does not explain the Hawks' absence -- or Michigan's presence for that matter. After all, St. Joe's was a team who won as much with its heart as its talent. It was the consummate underdog, a team Philadelphians would be glad to have represent their hard-nosed city. Quakers' fans will remember the Hawks' come-from-behind overtime victory over Penn earlier this season, but the real test came in the Atlantic 10 Tournament, when St. Joe's rallied from a 16-point deficit in the second half to beat St. Bonaventure in overtime. The Hawks were winners, not whiners like Bobby Cremins and his Ramblin' Wreck, who declined the NIT's invitation with the transparent excuse that Cremins would rather his players use the time to study for exams. It would have been nice to see St. Joe's make a serious run at the NIT title, but then maybe when the NCAA took away the Hawks' Tournament bid, a little bit of their pride went with it. Jeff Wieland is a College sophomore from Aptos, Calif., and a sports writer for The Daily Pennsylvanian. Peanuts and Cracker Jacks appears alternate Thursdays.