Wes Miller has been fired at Cincinnati after five season with the program after his team was knocked out of the Big 12 Basketball Tournament and is set to miss the NCAA Tournament once again – he will leave the program without ever advancing to the NCAA Tournament with the Bearcats.
What happens next in Cincinnati is anyone's best guess, and in the long-term, if they make the right hire it could spell bad news for the West Virginia Mountaineers and the rest of the Big 12 Conference. But for the immediate short-term prospects of WVU basketball, particularly when it comes to their postseason hopes, Miller's firing is quite good news.
That's because when it comes to determining the eight-team field for the Crown, the Big 12 is awarded two auto bids based on the highest ranked teams in the NET Rankings that don't make the NCAA Tournament. The first Big 12 teams currently projected outside of the field in order of NET Rankings are Cincinnati, Baylor, and West Virginia.
That means if Cincinnati and Baylor accept bids, WVU would be the first team in the league to miss an auto bid, and they would either have the rely on getting one of the two at-large bids to the tournament, or settle for the NIT if they decided to play in a postseason event.
However, teams do decline these events some times – and it often comes when a program is going through a coaching change. Now that Miller is on his way out in Cincinnati, it becomes a lot more likely that the Bearcats will turn down such an event. For now, the Mountaineers will have to keep their eyes on what other teams decide to do and how the NCAA Tournament field plays out before knowning for sure whether they can play in the Crown – but today's news really helps.