Huddle up, Arizona State fans. It’s time for the tri-annual commiseration session.

It’s easy to be angry right now. What we just watched unfold on the NCAA baseball selection show wasn’t necessarily unexpected, but how it happened was gut-wrenching. The Sun Devils not only didn’t see their name scroll across the bracket on Monday morning’s selection show, but they also had to watch in certain agony as its in-state rival Arizona’s name did appear on the screen.

Undeniable progress was made this season, but make no mistake; this was a gut punch and a pumping of the brakes on the momentum Willie Bloomquist gained during much of 2023. No one is taking this harder than the skipper himself, who, countless times this season, walked into a postgame press conference after a huge win with a stone-faced expression reminiscent of Kobe Bryant’s famous “job not finished” line.

Bloomquist and his players said all the right things during the good and the eventual bad season stretches. Yet despite that perceived preparation, they weren’t quite able to push their season over a crucial hump. This pain, a dull one that is rooted in the lower abdomen and radiates through the extremities, will linger all summer and into the fall. Soon it will be converted to fuel, but for now, it just aches. The postseason feat wasn’t achieved, and now Bloomquist will go into his third offseason with his goals still sitting unfinished like a construction project with a drained budget.

So many times this season, Tim McGraw’s How Bad Do You Want It blared from the speakers at Phoenix Muni as the Sun Devils poured out of the dugout and victoriously slapped hands behind the mound. So many times this season, a joyous locker room pounded music and whooped and hollered after another win, further proving they were closer to being the team they wanted to be than the team they were a year ago. ASU was ahead of schedule in year two under Bloomquist. After a tumultuous 2022, it looked as though they’d cruise into the NCAA Tournament and compete for a super regional berth. The dust hasn’t settled yet. Fans are still staring at their TVs with blank gazes, wondering just how we got here?

It’s hard to believe this is the reality the Sun Devils have to cope with as they undoubtedly slowly trickle out of the locker room today. ASU was doing everything right this season through the first two months. They tore through the first half of the Pac-12 schedule, taking care of business against lesser teams, sweeping rival Arizona, and taking two of three from surging Oregon State. Let’s be clear first and foremost, ASU played its way to the brink of the tournament bubble. Since it beat Oregon State to clinch the series on April 23, the Sun Devils went 5-11 in their final 16 games, falling from a potential hosting candidate to a razor-thin bubble team.

Then, things went south in a hurry. Arizona State lost two of three at eventual Pac-12 tournament champion Oregon. No big deal, some will say, since it’s a road series loss against a formidable team. When the Sun Devils returned home from that trip, they sat just a game back of first place in the Pac-12 with nine games left in the regular season and a series with first-place Stanford on deck. They still controlled their own destiny, not just for good seeding in a regional, but also to host a regional. That was May 5, just 24 days ago.

What immediately followed was a fatal combination of bad baseball, bad luck, and awful timing. ASU was swept by Stanford, in and of itself, not the worst thing as the Cardinal came into Tempe ranked No. 6 in the country and left ranked No. 4 following that three-game set. Looking back at that series, what hurts now is how close ASU was to winning each of the three contests and the reality that a single victory in that series would have Arizona State safely into the field of 64. On Friday, the Sun Devils put up six runs against Stanford’s blue chip starter Quinn Mathews. Alas, Stanford’s eight runs were just enough to capture the opener.

The Saturday game against Stanford stings like malt vinegar in an open wound. ASU had this one and retrospectively had its NCAA tournament bid locked up. The Sun Devils took a lead into the eighth, but eventual player of the year Alberto Rios had other plans when he clubbed a three-run game-winning homer out to left. In the Sunday finale, ASU drew even and hung around Stanford all day before the Cardinal blew it open in the top of the ninth. It wasn’t as ugly as the sweep at Stanford in 2022, but the result was still three losses, and one win would mean ASU is practicing right now instead of conducting teary-eyed exit interviews.

Then came the real backbreaker. ASU went to USC needing a series win badly, and it left after being swept. Two straight winless weekends, six consecutive losses, and a free falling national ranking and RPI that would prove to be the difference. The sweep at USC featured the antithesis of the Sun Devils’ issues all year. The bats went quiet as they scored a mere two runs all weekend and lost two of the three late. Giving up just nine runs over a weekend should be a sweep every time for a team with explosive bats, yet the Sun Devils founds themselves again searching for answers to prevent a game from ending up in the loss column. Again, just one win over the Trojans probably puts ASU into the field of 64.

Finally, those pesky two games against Arizona in April and May. ASU went south for the annual midweek non-conference meeting with its rival three weeks after the sweep at Muni. It was clear Arizona took that earlier result personally. The Cats destroyed ASU, dominating in every facet of a 20-0 win. Then a month later, in Scottsdale, the once-bullied Arizona did the bullying again, cruising past the Sun Devils 12-3 in the opener of the Pac-12 tournament. If you’re ASU, you didn’t necessarily need a win in either of these games, but simply not losing by the combined score of 32-3 just might have been a scenario that would have gotten you in. The committee chairman said Monday after the selection show that the margin of these two games did, in fact, play a role in their decision to include Arizona over ASU.

Now that we’ve covered the very necessary accountability, we can shift to the absolute puddle of vomit that the NCAA selection committee spewed this morning. If you grabbed a random person off the street who had not watched any college baseball this season and told them to fill out the bracket using only the RPI, this is roughly the bracket that person would have created.

The SEC, boosted in RPI by dominance in weak and geographically advantaged non-conference series, was awarded EIGHT of the 16 hosting positions for the regionals. Two other schools earned at large bids as very strong two seeds. The SEC is undoubtedly the best conference in baseball, but it’s also learned how to effectively game the system, building itself up to the point where its games against each other will ensure that the winners are the best teams in the country and the losers are firmly on the next tier. They stay home all February and most of March, and now they’ll get to stay home for the postseason. If the committee continues to bow down and kiss the boots of the RPI as it did today, what incentive do SEC teams have to schedule noteworthy tough road games in early season non-conference weekends?

The decision to include Arizona while excluding Arizona State and USC, for that matter, is questionable at best. By selecting the Cats and leaving those other two teams at the altar, the NCAA set this precedent: Being mediocre all season long and then getting hot for one week in a conference tournament is more valuable than winning conference series and putting together a better overall record and conference mark. That’s not the message you want to send.

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