In Joe Lunardi’s final projection, Air Force wasn’t even on the radar screen. There were at least eight teams that Lunardi believed would miss the tournament but that were still ahead of Air Force in the pecking order. Air Force is literally mentioned nowhere on the page.

It is absolutely mind-boggling and baffling that Air Force got in. I’ve been following this tournament for 16 years — and Selection Sunday has been my personal Christmas for more than a decade — and in all that time, I can’t remember ever being so stunned and baffled by an at-large selection by the committee. Honestly, it makes no sense whatsoever. Air Force, with an RPI of 51 and an awful SOS of 173, with no quality wins whatsoever, with a bad conference-tournament quarterfinal loss to an inferior team — basically, with no compelling argument for inclusion — gets in ahead of Big East warrior Cincinnati, RPI #20 Missouri State (the highest RPI team ever to be left out of the NCAA Tournament), Hofstra, Florida State and others? It makes absolutely, positively no sense. As Stewart Mandel says:

How can committee chairman Craig Littlepage go on national television and extol the importance of playing a tough schedule, then take a team that finished second in the weak Mountain West, lost in the first round of the conference tourney to 14-18 Wyoming and played the nation’s 273rd-strongest non-conference schedule?

How, indeed. I think Becky’s dad provided the best explanation I’ve heard: Dick Cheney wanted Air Force in the tournament, and he invited the committee members out on a hunting trip in the event they decided not to select the Falcons. :)

Meanwhile, the more I think about Billy Packer and Jim Nantz’s ridiculous, ignorant rant on national TV against the MVC and CAA, the more pissed off I am about it. They ought to be demoted by CBS to a position more accurately befitting their level of analytical expertise (I’m thinking maybe janitor), but of course that won’t happen. So, short of actually losing their jobs, they need to be forcefully called out on the carpet by every single serious college basketball analyst in the country for their complete and utter ignorance of the selection process (e.g., citing past years’ statistics, as if that is somehow relevant), their blatant and unjustifiable anti-mid-major prejudice (acting like the MVC and CAA were unfairly rewarded, when in reality there’s a far stronger argument that they were unfairly snubbed), their grotesquely unfair arguments (e.g., making apples-to-oranges comparisons about teams’ tournament records over the years), their insane sense of big-conference entitlement (they clearly feel that the Big 12, ACC and Pac-10 inherently deserve more bids than the MVC, regardless of the relative strengths of the tournament-worthy teams in any given year), their utter lack of understanding of what a “quality win” is (hint: it doesn’t have to be over a big-name team; it just has to be over a good team), and of course their inexcusable rudeness to Craig Littlepage, cutting him off when he was trying to congratulate the teams who made the tournament. It was truly one of the most disgraceful performances I’ve ever seen by a pair of TV pundits in my life, and they ought to be ashamed of themselves. (Yoni Cohen and The Valley Ledger have more thoughts along roughly the same lines.)

UPDATE: Pat Forde is rebutting Packer and Nantz:

At least two of the complaints voiced by Nantz-Packer are poorly reasoned:

* That by giving four bids to the Missouri Valley and four to the Atlantic Coast Conference, the committee is saying the leagues are equal.

Clearly, by giving three top-four seeds to ACC teams and no top-six seeds to Valley teams, that’s not what the committee is saying. The ACC is better at the top than the Valley, and everyone knows it. But the committee did say that the Valley’s third and fourth teams are better than the ACC’s fifth and sixth.

* Past NCAA performance by teams from power conferences dwarfs that of teams from leagues like the Valley, and should be kept in mind when issuing bids.

It’s abundantly clear that teams from the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-10 and SEC have done better than teams from the Valley, Colonial and other allegedly lesser leagues. But what Nantz and Packer left out was the fact that the best teams from those leagues always start out with higher seeds and weaker opponents.

Sure, the last six Valley entrants in the NCAAs have only won one game. They’ve also been seeded seventh, 10th, 14th, ninth, 11th and sixth in that time. Valley teams went 1-1 in games where it had the higher seed during that three-year span, and every loss was by single digits. If Southern Illinois losing by a point in 2003 as a No. 11 seed and by a point in ‘04 as a 9-seed reflects poorly on the Missouri Valley, that’s a fairly merciless standard to apply.

And if Nantz-Packer had gone back to 2002, they’d see that the Valley went a combined 3-2 in the dance with teams coming from No. 11 and No. 12 seedings. (All three victories came against higher-seeded teams from power conferences, by the way.)

So here’s the BCS-school mindset that the Valley and CAA will be up against this tournament: now that we’ve let you in, work miracles or we’ll rip you.

That is absolutely correct, and absolutely ridiculous. Amen.