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I thought is was a shame that the conference champioins for C-USA which was Tulsa is a 12 seed. No other school gets an invite to either the NCAA or WNIT. Tulsa posted a 25-5 record and Rice if not SMU could have or should have gotten an invite some where. Rice was 17-13 and was competitive. This conference gets no respect and that's is rather jacked up. Any thoughts on how to improve the chances of C-USA get more tournament berths next year? Does anyone know what the RPI ranking was for the Lady Mustangs? I would interested to see what their RPI number was. What's the overall RPI for the conference?

Well, didn't we have a slow start this year? That didn't help matters, I'm sure if we had been able to put up a record similar to what we accomplished last year we would have at least gotten another invite to the WNIT.

Isn't Memphis a #1 seed?

Talking about Women, LH

Ah, sorry.

Rice got a WNIT bid.

Owls to Host Jackson State in WNIT Opener
3/13/06 Rice will make its fifth appearance in the Women's National Invitational Tournament Wednesday, as the Owls host Jackson State in the preliminary round of the prestigious post-season basketball tourney. The tip-off time for Wednesday's game at Autry Court is 7 pm.

Win more games could help

The SMU women finished the regular season with an RPI of 88. Don't know how much (if any) their performance in the conference tournament would change that number. http://sports.espn.go.com/ncw/news/stor ... nkings/rpi

Conference USA is rated 14th as a conference out of 31 (by RPI). This is a step down from the WAC in the last few years, which was typically about 10th. Some of the conferences ahead of us include the America East, Colonial, and Big South. If we want to make the post season, we need more wins and we need the other 9 teams below us to step up as well. 7 of the teams are worse than 150 in RPI. By comparison, last year the WAC had 6 in the top 100, and only 3 worse than 150. As for our team specifically, we only had one win against the top 100 this year, compared to 5 losses outside the top 100. We played a good nonconference schedule, but we needed to win a few of those games against teams like TCU, Liberty, and George Washington.

They lost too many NC games early in the year and then had a great conference run. If they had beaten Rice in the tournament and in that last regular season game, they might have beaten them out for a WNIT bid.

I agree with EastStang. I think the WNIT selection commitee probably treated our semifinal game with Rice as a play in for their tournament. We probably would have taken their place if we had been the conference runner up.

Conference USA would be higher up the food chain if we had found a way to take Louisiana Tech in with us. Their top 20 program would boost the RPI.

11 teams with RPI's lower than ours got invited. One more win against anyone over the course of the season probably would have done it. Very dissapointing.