By Bruce Pascoe

Arizona Daily Star

Tucson, Arizona | Published: 03.16.2009

The upsets kept popping up all weekend, and Russ Pennell’s heart kept sinking.

Temple beat Xavier in the Atlantic 10 tournament. USC beat ASU in the Pac-10. Mississippi State beat LSU in the SEC. All three winners took automatic bids, pushing out more bubble teams from at-large berths.

“When Mississippi State won, I thought it cooked us,” said Pennell, the UA’s interim head coach.

Yet when the very first NCAA tournament region was announced Sunday, the Wildcats were listed as No. 12 seed in the Midwest, with a first-round game against Utah on Friday in Miami.

Their nation-leading streak of NCAA tournament appearances would continue to 25, by the slimmest of margins.

One second Pennell was looking at the floor in the Lohse Room upstairs in McKale Center, unaware of the CBS television screen. The next, he looked up to find his players jumping on chairs and tables.

“Just absolutely going berserk,” Pennell said. “It actually took me five minutes for me to find out who we were playing and where. I just knew we were in.”

While the Wildcat players were not available for comment Sunday, Pennell said he told his wife he almost wished the CBS cameras could have caught the excitement. Certainly, it was a moment permanently etched in his mind.

“I must have hugged the same guy five times, and he kept forgetting he hugged me,” Pennell said. “And that’s great. That moment I’ll never forget as long as I live, just the elation on the kids’ face.”

Pennell also spoke with former coach Lute Olson via telephone, jokingly telling him, “The streak’s somebody else’s problem now.”

But the joy Arizona experienced was undoubtedly the opposite of what was felt by bubble teams such as St. Mary’s, Creighton and San Diego State, all of which had better RPIs than UA’s 63 and yet were not invited.

NCAA tournament selection committee chair Mike Slive would not say if the Wildcats were the last team invited, but it was undoubtedly close. UA had the highest RPI of any at-large team.

“We really don’t think about teams standing alone,” Slive said. “So there’s no way I can really answer that. They were in a grouping of teams in the conversation.”

Pennell said he felt for two friends also in that group who didn’t get invitations — St. Mary’s coach Randy Bennett and Creighton coach Dana Altman — but that he believed that the Wildcats’ overall season was simply stronger.

While Arizona finished at 19-13, having lost five of its final six games, the Wildcats beat Kansas, Gonzaga, San Diego State, UCLA and Washington, among others.

“There was no question in my mind that we were good enough to get in the tournament,” Pennell said. “I just had a concern with how all the conference tournaments were playing out, and I thought we might get left out.

“My argument all along is that we beat three or four teams that were conference champions. You have to go pretty far along to find somebody with that kind of résumé.”

The NCAA selection committee apparently agreed. Slive said it wasn’t RPIs that matter as much as a team’s overall season.

“We say it over and over again, that the RPI is a tool that is used among a whole lot of other factors by the committee,” Slive said. “It’s the entire body of work that counts.”

What counted were those December wins against Gonzaga and Kansas, plus UA’s wins over UCLA, Washington and USC during the conference season.

Although it was not an easy conclusion to reach, those successes apparently overrode the Wildcats’ late-season plunge and the fact that they have not beaten a Top 150 RPI team outside Arizona.

“We discussed (Arizona) a lot,” Slive said. “We were aware they lost several games down the stretch. The end result was that, after a lot of deliberation, the committee obviously felt the team had a strong résumé, with six wins against the Top 50. It helped Arizona offset the bottom of their schedule. And also, their losses were to pretty good teams, teams that were in” the NCAA field.

The fact that Arizona was just 2-9 in true road games, winning only at Oregon and Oregon State, made the conversation more animated.

“That was a very, very important point,” Slive said. “The committee had that information, discussed that information, and each member of the committee had to balance that with their very, very significant success. … This is a classic example of a team with good attributes and blemishes.”

But if the Wildcats can beat Utah (24-9), an experienced team led by Australian big man Luke Nevill, any lingering questions can go away. They would also get a chance to face the winner between fourth-seeded Wake Forest and 13th-seeded Cleveland State on Sunday in the second round.

“We hope to validate our being picked,” Pennell said. “We’re not just happy to be here. We’d like to stay a little while if we can.”