Texas Southern will play Southern on Saturday afternoon in a Southwestern Athletic Conference championship game that comes with a catch.
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Texas Southern already won the championship and the league’s automatic bid to the NCAA tournament on Friday night when it beat Prairie View A&M in a semifinal game in Houston.
Say what?
Five SWAC teams were deemed ineligible for the NCAA tournament this season by the NCAA because of failing scores in the Academic Progress Rate system that encourages retention and progress toward degree for student athletes.
Southern is one of those teams and the team it beat in its semifinal win, Alabama State, also was ineligible. That made the other semifinal the real championship game and rendered the actual championship game meaningless.
So why were ineligible teams allowed to compete in the tournament at all. This isn’t the first time the SWAC has had this problem and in past years the conference hasn’t allowed ineligible teams to compete in the conference tournament. Last year only seven teams participated.
According to a report in USA Today that said only four teams in the conference were ineligible, SWAC commissioner Duer Sharp asked the presidents of the schools to include the ineligible teams and the presidents voted to do so.
The USA Today report said Southern, Arkansas-Pine Bluff, Grambling and Mississippi Valley State were ineligible for APR scores. A separate report by the Montgomery Advertiser confirmed Alabama State is also ineligible. That’s half the conference.
If two ineligible teams would have advanced to the championship game, the conference would have sent the eligible team that advanced deepest to the NCAA tournament. If two eligible teams advanced to the same level before losing, the conference would have sent the highest seeded eligible team.
All of this leaves a glaring question for Texas Southern coach Mike Davis in Sunday’s game against Southern. Why would Davis bother playing any of his core players in a meaningless game with the NCAA tournament still to come?
“I’ve never been in this situation before where we won the tournament on the night before,” Davis said in a postgame radio interview. “I’m not going to get our guys hurt (Sunday), but we’re definitely going to come out and try to win the tournament. We play a pretty good Southern basketball team and it’s my job to get these guys back up and ready for the game tomorrow.”
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[Kyle Ringo is the assistant editor of The Dagger on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at kyle.ringo@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KyleRingo
from Yahoo Sports http://ift.tt/1BDek59
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