South Florida Coach Unintentionally Disrespects Buffalo Bulls

Tonight I sat down to write the NCAA tournament preview of the Buffalo Bulls vs. the South Florida Bulls. While I have watched all the of the MAC squads many times this season, I’ll be perfectly honest, I have yet to watch the South Florida squad play a game. In my research of the team, I came across this article and this one.

Apparently head coach Jose Fernandez is upset that USF got the shaft from the NCAA selection committee. The stat that was used is the RPI, where USF is currently sitting at 14. This dude is appalled that his team, with their RPI ranking, had to travel and isn’t hosting an NCAA tournament because they “only” received a 6th seed.

To put that in perspective, Central Michigan is an 11 seed with a 15 ranking. Buffalo, also an 11 seed, is ranked 22.

Cry me a river, dude.

First, I’ll attack a couple more of his arguments. One is that they had one of the closest losses to UCONN, which beat them 3 times this season. Of course not mentioned is the 51 point loss, so not really in the same league as UCONN. Two, they talk about beating Ohio State, a 3 seed. OSU is basically a one woman show, with Kelsey Mitchell, who is averaging 24. 5 points per. She had a bad game. Oh, and South Florida hit 50% of their threes. Re-roll the game, and USF might still win, but...

Should he be upset with his 6th seed? Maybe, but he obviously has no clue about the MAC and what they have done this year.

Now on to what I do know. Buffalo is a fantastic team that only avoided being ranked in the top 25 because CMU proved to be slightly better in the this season and won 2 out of three. IF there wasn’t wasn’t a team of that caliber in the MAC, Buffalo is sitting at 29-3 and ranked. Cierra Dillard is a gamer that can do a little of everything. Stephanie Reid is a point guard’s point guard that hustles and can dish and can score and can probably fix the team bus if it breaks down, while quoting Aristotle. In essence, she can do everything. Cassie Oursler is a proto-type center, and then there are the rest of the Bulls, who hover around 6 feet and have the skill set to do whatever is needed.

Sometimes at Hustle Belt we go full on reporter and just report the facts without bias. Sometimes, we jump on the soapbox and preach. This “preview” is one of those times. This is an even match-up between two great teams. Since we are the MAC blog, we really hope Buffalo wins. Since I found out the opposing coach thinks he was disrespected, but failed to mention every other small conference school, like CMU and Buffalo, I hope our Bulls win by 50.