Here’s Why Louisville, Pittsburgh Were Left Out Of 2021 NCAA Tournament Field

Louisville missing out was nearly unfathomable back in February, when the Cardinals came into the season as the No. 7 team in the country featuring a lineup that included, at the time, three potential first-round picks in catcher Henry Davis, infielder Alex Binelas and outfielder Levi Usher. 

Things were never easy for Louisville this season, however. It came into the campaign not at full strength, and it just never quite seemed to get on track. 

Davis went on to have an All-American season at catcher, one that has pushed him to the top of the first round on draft boards, but Binelas and Usher were both mired in extended slumps. Usher’s lasted the entire season, and Binelas had only recently started to hit like the player we expected coming into the year. 

Injuries also hit the pitching staff hard. Projected Friday starter Glenn Albanese, for example, was limited to just three starts this season, but even among the healthy pitchers, it was a tough year on the mound. 

Lefthander Michael Kirian didn’t take to starting as well as hoped, eventually precipitating a move back to the bullpen, and he ended up with an ERA approaching 5.00 on the season. Fifth-year senior righthander Luke Smith was set up to be the steady stalwart in the rotation, but he finished with a 5.85 ERA. Jack Perkins and Michael Prosecky, two pitchers expected to take steps forward in role and performance, weren’t effective when they pitched. 

The Cardinals treaded water for more than half of the season and still looked like a solid, if flawed, postseason team that might find a way to host if they got hot down the stretch. After a series win on the road against Virginia in mid April, they were 14-6 in the ACC and were thought of as likely the second-best team in the conference, behind only Notre Dame. 

Immediately after that series win over the Cavaliers, Louisville had its series with Pittsburgh canceled due to a Covid pause on Pitt’s end, and things simply weren’t the same afterward.

A series sweep at the hands of Clemson after getting back on the field was the first Louisville had suffered as a member of the ACC. A series win over Duke at home seemed to steady the ship, but that turned out to be misleading, as series sweeps against North Carolina and Miami soon followed. Shockingly, Louisville lost 10 of its last 12 ACC games.

The Cardinals went 1-1 in the ACC Tournament with a win over Clemson and an extra-innings loss to Georgia Tech. With a 17-17 record in conference games including the tournament, there was still a glimmer of hope on Monday that they would have their name called, but that poor finish and an RPI that sat at 74 as the selection show started did them in. 

Louisville coach Dan McDonnell felt pretty good about his team last week. On the field, it got a key piece of the pitching staff in righthander Jared Poland back and Albanese was set to return this weekend. But as he observed upsets in conference tournaments taking place and analyzed the situation as the week went on, he came to a different conclusion. 

“I think throughout the weekend, what you realize is, if everything goes as planned, maybe there’s a good shot you make it, but you learn in baseball there’s a lot of upsets, and it just dawned on me as the weekend was playing out,” McDonnell said. 

This is a feeling Louisville hasn’t had to deal with in a while, and the feeling of having a team with this much veteran talent miss out is completely new to the program. The last time it missed regionals in 2011, the team just wasn’t ready, with most of its best players among the youngest on the roster. 

“I’d be lying if I said I was handling it well,” McDonnell said. “It’s hard. It’s really hard. And what it does (is) it just reminds you how blessed we’ve been, it reminds you of how fortunate I’ve been, it reminds me of how special the players have been, and not just talented players but players that produce, players that perform when the lights were on, so it’s very emotional, the sadness and the frustration and the disappointment, but you also get to reminisce about ‘wow, this has been such a special run.’”

Pitt being left out is surprising in its own way. Unlike Louisville, Pitt came into the season without any real hype, but it quickly turned into one of the best stories in the sport with a hot start. And it was even named as one of the 20 potential host sites for regionals a few weeks ago. 

Just like Louisville, though, it did not play well after its pause, which extended an extra week when its series with Northern Kentucky was canceled as well. A series win over Boston College immediately followed, but like the Duke series win for Louisville, that was not a sign of things to come. 

A loss in the series finale against BC, followed by sweeps against North Carolina State and Wake Forest to wrap up the regular season, meant that Pitt lost its last seven ACC games, and a split in its ACC Tournament games wasn’t enough to change the outcome. 

At the time the series between the two was canceled, both teams looked like regional locks and you might have bet on both hosting. Now, both will be at home on regional weekend, but just not in the way they wanted. 

“It’s amazing when you look at it on paper, both Pitt and ourselves, they’re winning their division and we’re a game maybe or so out of our division, playing really good baseball, and I never would (have) imagined when I got that call on a Wednesday afternoon that (it) would send us into a tailspin,” McDonnell said.

The bubble shrinking a bit as conference tournaments wound down played a role. Minimally, upsets in the ASUN, Big South and MAAC tournaments took away three bubble spots, and for Pitt, the second team out of the field, that was enough. 

Louisville was not among the first four teams out, so it being left out is due to other factors. One is the relative mediocrity of the ACC this season. Being around .500 in the ACC is usually enough to get you into the tournament, because that typically also means your RPI is going to be in good shape. 

But this year was different, with just two ACC teams, Notre Dame, the regular-season champion, and Duke, the tournament champion, boasting top-20 RPIs. Resume-changing series wins in the ACC this season just didn’t exist to the same extent, so once Louisville started taking on water, there was little it could do to claw back, especially since the league played 36 conference games, which limited how much teams were able to bolster resumes through non-conference games. 

We will never know what Louisville would have done with two other non-conference weekends, but we do know that the non-conference schedule it played did not help its cause. Its two pre-ACC series were against Bellarmine and Western Illinois. Whether those series were already scheduled or were pivoted to once Covid made scheduling tougher this season is immaterial to the resume. Outside of a late-season midweek win over Vanderbilt, there were just no marquee non-conference wins to hang its hat on. 

At every turn, the selection committee this season has made it clear that it was fairly unimpressed with the ACC. Just two league sites were chosen among the 20 potential hosts. Notre Dame, the runaway league champ and the ACC’s only host, was not a top-eight seed. And today, two of the three true bubble teams in the conference, along with North Carolina, which got in, were left out.