BATON ROUGE — The LSU Tigers watched in the team squad room Sunday the NCAA selection show and now await to see when and whom they will play later this week in the 2004 National Invitation Tournament.
The Tigers went through about 45 minutes of shooting drills before settling into the locker room area to watch the CBS show. The NIT committee is expected to announce its teams late Sunday as well as playing dates and times. Four or five early-round games will be televised by ESPN or ESPN2. The Tigers will be making their first NIT appearance since 2002 when LSU beat Iowa in Iowa City on ESPN in the first round and lost to Ball State in the second round in Baton Rouge.
“I think most of the time, you find yourself where you are by what you’ve done or what you didn’t do,” said LSU Coach John Brady after the selection show when he met with the media. “We had played ourselves into a situation where our team was at 7-3 (in SEC), a five-seed or better, provided everything stayed right. But it wasn’t. It didn’t happen that way. We did win a game at home against Ole Miss. We played Kentucky awfully well — played them within four or six where it was a two-point game with 14 seconds to go. We weren’t able to win on the road at Auburn and the South Carolina game got away from us in the last seven or eight minutes.
“I guess in the committee’s mind, we weren’t NCAA (Tournament) worthy. That’s debatable. I’ve never experienced anything like this. I hurt for our team and our players. Anytime, you have (Matt) Freije at Vanderbilt, Lawrence Roberts at Mississippi State and Jaime Lloreda at LSU — the three best players in the league. Anybody else who lost a player wasn’t even any comparison to what happened to us. It would have been hard enough to replace a player of that caliber in the spring or summer to prepare for next year. We had to turn around and do it in a week or so with a young team. The positive thing about it, there are 100 odd teams still left playing college basketball in the country and we are one of those.”
It is expected that LSU will travel early in the tournament because of the NCAA Women’s Regional in Baton Rouge beginning Sunday and previously scheduled construction on the concourse of the Maravich Center that must be finished before the NCAA women’s committee begins its set up on Friday. LSU Athletic Department officials have told the NIT committee that they would be able to host a quarterfinal game March 25 or 26 if LSU is still alive in the tournament.
The Tigers are 18-10 overall entering post-season play for the fourth time in John Brady‘s seven years as the head coach.
“We would have rather been in the NCAA and when our team was right, we were going to be in the NCAA. Had we won one more game, we would have probably made it anyway,” Brady said. “But we are still playing basketball. It is our fourth postseason tournament in the last five years, and we get to play another basketball game with a young team that is going to gain experience every time it goes on the floor.
“We had a good practice (Sunday). We sat in the squad room and watched the tournament pairings. We beat five teams in the tournament; beat Alabama twice, beat Utah, and beat UAB. Our strength of schedule was one of the top-28 in the country. Our RBI probably dropped to about 38 or 40, but those are good numbers over the course of a season. Certainly what happened to us over the last couple of weeks was difficult for me and difficult for our team. I hope it doesn’t happen to anyone else. We have everybody back on this team, minus Charlie (Thompson), plus we are adding two or three very good recruits. We are excited about the base we have, what is coming to our team a year from now and the direction it is going.”