Part of the fun of March Madness is when you get teams who otherwise wouldn’t be in the Big Dance winning their conference tournaments and punching their tickets to the Tournament. That’s exactly what happened to this St. Mary’s team. The Gaels were 20-11 going into the WCC Tournament, and while they were in the top 40 overall on KenPom and likely would have played their way off a weak bubble, they left nothing to chance by dominating Gonzaga in the WCC final to grab the conference’s auto-bid as an 11-seed.
They’re also a familiar NCAA Tournament foe to the Villanova Wildcats, as Randy Bennett and the Gaels beat Jay Wright and the Wildcats in the second round of the 2010 NCAA Tournament in Providence.