Tim Jankovich is standing up for the little guy

While Bracketologists went back-and-forth on whether or not Creighton should have earned an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament, I (among many others) wondered where was the love for Illinois State.

The Redbirds beat the blue out of the Bluejays by 24 points in the Missouri Valley Conference Tournament semifinals. Yet, the Redbirds, who lost by three in overtime in the finals to Northern Iowa, settled for an NIT bid. And head coach Tim Jankovich, the Valley's most quotable coach, wasn't necessarily happy with it.

"The trend right now is that we're moving toward eliminating as many non-BCS [conference schools] as we can from this tournament. That's the discouraging thing to me."

But wait ... there's more:

"It's a national sport to beat up the non-BCS schools," he said. "It's a joke that [analysts] say those things because obviously they've never coached nor scheduled. ... You can never satisfy that. We can never get the Lakers on our schedule three times a year. It's not going to happen. So if that's the criteria, we cannot win that game."

Coach Jank makes a great point. Damn Phil Jackson isn't willing to take time out of his busy schedule to play a 2-for-1 with Illinois State. Maybe Kobe fears The 'O'-Hawk.

And I think the Redbirds boss' best point is this whole RPI mess. It's clearly a double-standard. It's like having googly eyes for the drunk chick at the bar, but being too nervous to talk to her. But Jankovich puts it in more relavant terms.

"They all talk about Top 50 wins like those are not subjective. You don't have a Top 50 win unless there's RPI. That's how you get a number. They use those like crazy for someone like Syracuse, for example: 'Syracuse has six Top 50 wins.' But Creighton's 39 RPI you should ignore because RPI's irrelevant? Well, if it's irrelevant, then you have zero Top 50 wins because there is no Top 50 without RPI."

Jankovich once coached at Kansas and Illinois under Bill Self before going to Bloomington-Normal. So he should have a foot in the door to get a KU-ISU game, right?

"First he'd start laughing, which is what we get a lot," Jankovich said, chuckling. "It's comic relief for a lot of [BCS coaches]."

Don't feel too bad, coach, SIU is still waiting for Ron Guenther to call back. Maybe someone should remind him of the difference between SIUC and SIUE.

I feel that down the line, Jankovich will be a BCS-caliber coach. Wonder if he'll be singing a different tune down the road.

Illinois State coach Tim Jankovich says non-BCS schools get burned in NCAA tournament selection process [Chicago Tribune]