The saddest part of the Mich. State fiasco is that we shouldn't have even been playing them until the Final Four!! There is NO WAY we aren't a #1 seed in some regional! Once again, the powers that be in the National Clowns Against Ames put the screws to good old ISU and it's faithful. Oh well, we should be used to it by now.
I wish just for once we would let this drop for once. I dislike the NCAA as much as anyone else, but their stated objective has always been to give the top 16 seeds the best opportunity to get to the Sweet 16. They figured putting us in Minneapolis finalizes that objective. But there's no way they can give us the #1 seed in the Midwest as that belonged to Michigan St. We weren't going to take away Duke's #1 seed, so we were fighting Stanford and Arizona for the #1 seeds in the South and West. I think I remember something about how Arizona doing something to earn that #1 West seed over Stanford, while Stanford got sent to the South as a "punishment." This is how the top 8 seeds broke down that year (and where they played):
East
Duke (27-4) (Winston-Salem)
Temple (26-5) (Buffalo)
Midwest
Michigan St (26-7) (Cleveland)
Iowa St (29-4) (Minneapolis)
West
Arizona (26-6) (Tuscon)
St. John's (24-7) (Salt Lake City)
South
Stanford (26-3) (Birmingham)
Cincinnati (28-3) (Nashville)
If we had the current "pod" system then that we have now, maybe we're the #1 seed playing in the South (because we could then play our first two rounds in Minneapolis and not in Birmingham), maybe we're not. But also keep one thing in mind - if Kenyon Martin doesn't break his leg, Cincinnati gets the #1 seed in the south. Then we're fighting Stanford and Arizona for the #1 seed in the West, and there's no way that's happening. Bottom line, there's no way you can realistically argue that we absolutely deserved the #1 seed without looking at the RPIs that year and without taking regional advantages into consideration. To say we automatically deserved a #1 seed in 2000 is just retrospective homeristic thinking.