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On what ought to have been the most thrilling day of his career, High Point coach Flynn Clayman seemed uncommonly miserable. In his postgame news conference after his Panthers defeated No. 5 seed Wisconsin, he spent fewer than 60 words complimenting his team before he began complaining about the state of college basketball. Earlier, in an on-court interview with Turner Sports, he didn’t even wait that long to share his gripes.
Jared Greenberg: “How does it feel to win your first NCAA Tournament game, Coach Clayman?”
Flynn Clayman: “It looks pretty obvious to me that high major teams need to play mid-majors during the season because they said we didn’t play nobody. We played somebody now!”
"Looks pretty obvious to me that high-majors need to play mid-majors early in the season. Because they said we didn't play nobody. We played somebody now."
-High Point HC Flynn Clayman pic.twitter.com/IpObzgJSGm
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Um, what?
Who said that? And how did that impact the Panthers? Clayman is contending mid-majors in general, and High Point in particular, are getting a raw deal in the sport of college basketball and specifically the NCAA Tournament.
Good thing he’s an excellent basketball coach, because if he’d chosen to become an attorney, his argument on this case suggests he’d be no match for The Lincoln Lawyer.
Clayman has been the head coach at High Point for one season. The Panthers had a long history of NAIA and NCAA Division II competition and upgraded to D-I in 1999-2000. They made their first NCAA appearance a year ago under Alan Huss, who left after that success to return to Greg McDermott’s Creighton staff and become the Bluejays’ coach-in-waiting.
So suddenly High Point is America’s victim?
HISTORY OF UPSETS BY SEED:
16 vs. 1 | 15 vs. 2 | 14 vs. 3 | 13 vs. 4 | 12 vs. 5
High Point entered the 2026 edition of March Madness as champion of the Big South Conference. Of 31 Division I leagues, the Big South was rated No. 21 using the NCAA’s NET rankings. In the previous 15 tournaments, the Big South champion has been a No. 16 seed on 10 occasions, including four when that team was assigned to the First Four in Dayton. Only one other Big South team since 2010 climbed as high as this year’s Panthers, to a No. 12 seed.
And there was no public controversy at all about this year’s seed assignment. Of the top 150 NCAA projections aggregated at the Bracket Matrix, only eight failed to place High Point on the No. 12 line. That’s 5 percent.
So why is Clayman so angry?
“High Point and Miami Ohio are 2-1 in Quad 1 games,” he said Thursday. “We couldn’t get games. They couldn’t get games.”
Those in the news conference in Portland obviously were focused on the impressive upset victory they’d just seen, and so their questions concentrated primarily on the result. There was an obvious follow-up there that was not asked: Why didn’t High Point and Miami play each other?
I know the answer to this, and it was confirmed to me Thursday afternoon by a high-major coach: Because too many of the mid-majors don’t want to lose to a quality mid-major opponent than any more than high majors do.
“I can tell you from experience that I had a harder time getting a good mid-major to play a home-and-home series than playing a high major,” he said. “If these guys guys think high major teams are coming to their place, they are feeling themselves a little too much.”
He listed nine prominent major programs he scheduled in his previous job, at a successful mid-major with multiple conference tournament titles. All of those games were played on the road.
Clayman’s suggestion that high majors “need to play” mid-majors offered neither a rationale for this position nor a mechanism by which it could be executed. There are 79 teams in Power 5 leagues. There are 286 Division I teams outside that subset. Is every P5 supposed to play two? Three? Four? And would the mid-majors plan to compensate the high major teams at the same level they are now, for the home-and-home non-league games they play among themselves, the single event games like Duke-Michigan in Washington or the multi-team events like the Players Era event in Las Vegas?
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The reality: The NCAA Tournament reserves 25 automatic bids for what now could be called mid-major champions. That's 37 percent of the field. And that's as it should be. Without automatic qualification, it would be a phony championship. But relative to the mistreatment being alleged, only 22 percent of the top 68 teams in WAB are mid-major programs, and only 18 percent of the top 68 in the KenPom ratings.
The NCAA hasn’t the authority to enforce scheduling constraints. The teams under the Division I umbrella are a vast, disparate group with widely varying degrees of investment. There is no barrier to that investment among members of any league. Gonzaga, Xavier and Butler are examples of programs that advanced from mid-majors to power players in the past 30 years.
Clayman is not alone in suggesting the mid-major programs are playing on an uneven court in regards to March Madness. He’s also not alone in misinterpreting the path to entry, or in being largely wrong about how to improve the success rate.
“We won 22 of our last 23 games, and we didn’t move up one spot in the metrics,” Clayman said. “Not one.”
Because he referred to “the metrics” generically, we cannot know for certain what ranking he was referencing. But, inconveniently for Clayman, the T-Rank metric at BartTorvik.com, which is one of the three predictive metrics listed on an official NCAA team sheet, has a tool that can identify where a team ranked at any point in the season.
In the case of High Point, the Panthers were No. 97 in T-Rank after a loss to Winthrop on Jan. 14, then fell all the way to No. 109 after beating Presbyterian – which finished under .500 on the season and in Big South play – by just three points at home. When High Point then won 14 in a row against league opponents, it climbed to No. 92.
High Point’s excellence placed them No. 69 in Wins Above Bubble. That was the fourth-best ranking of any team outside a top-10 league.
What if High Point had played and defeated the Miami RedHawks? That would have improved that mark, certainly more than defeating, say, Georgia Tech. The most easily solvable problem for quality mid-majors in the pursuit of more NCAA Tournament at-large bids is their refusal to play one another. Quad 1 games are not labeled by the level of conference.
A High Point non-league game at Miami, McNeese, Santa Clara, VCU, South Florida, Tulsa, Akron or Yale – every one of those, and more – would have been a Quad 1 opportunity for the Panthers. A neutral site game against any of them would have been Quad 2. And you see in the resumes of the highest rated mid-majors examples of intersection among them.
McNeese played Santa Clara and Murray State. Santa Clara played Saint Louis and New Mexico. New Mexico played VCU and Santa Clara VCU played South Florida and New Mexico. All were rated inside the top 60 in WAB, which means those that did not win automatic bids were close to reaching the NCAAs. The Lobos could be considered just 15 spots from the field. Entering demanded not a stronger schedule, but more impressive results.
Of course, when two mid-majors play, one of them is going to lose. That’s how sports work. Every coach knows this. Too many know a good deal less, however, about how the NCAA Tournament selection process functions. Its secrets are so open and available that 81 percent of brackets projections on the Matrix correctly identified all 68 teams. It’s so much easier to complain about how it comes out, though, and it generates more attention.
And in 2026, engagement may be the only thing as important in college sports as winning.
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