March isn’t the time of year for fairness.

If it was, it would reward each and every deserving team. Vanderbilt is deserving of being in the NCAA Tournament. To lose your leading scorer and then flip it into overdrive down the stretch is the stuff that March is made of. If you saw the passion that Jerry Stackhouse’s team played with on Friday night in an SEC Tournament quarterfinal win against Kentucky, you would’ve said exactly what SEC Network anchor Dari Nowkhah said as he introduced the postgame highlights.

“If that’s not an NCAA Tournament team, I don’t know what is.”

I nodded along with Nowkhah. After all, Vandy had just earned its 10th win in 11 games, the second of which against NCAA Tournament-bound Kentucky. In fact, 5 of those 10 wins came against teams who are expected to be dancing.

During the pregame to Saturday afternoon’s SEC Tournament semifinal matchup against A&M, ESPN showed a clip of a juiced up Stackhouse walking off the post-Kentucky production set saying “y’all pick us one time.”

How can you not root for that? Show the Dores some respect!

March, however, doesn’t care about your feelings. Specifically, the selection committee doesn’t care about your feelings.

It cares about putting the best résumés in the field, and unfortunately for Stackhouse’s squad after running out of gas against A&M on Saturday, all signs point to his team not being one of them. At least that’s what history suggests.

The NCAA Tournament team (excluding auto-bids) with the worst NET ranking to make the field was 2019 St. John’s, who made the field despite a No. 73 NET ranking. That’s the only team to ever get an at-large bid with a NET ranking worse than No. 70.

Vandy’s NET ranking was No. 79 entering Saturday. Yikes. To say that the blowout loss to A&M was costly would be an understatement. ESPN Bracketologist Joe Lunardi addressed Stackhouse’s “y’all pick us one time” comment by setting the stage for Saturday.

“Vandy is clearly good enough to be an NCAA Tournament team. The numbers, do not work in their favor, historically,” Lunardi said prior to Saturday’s semifinal. “I would say 1 more win and I’ll put the Commodores in the field. I think the numbers will follow. We’ll see if the rest of the country cooperates and the bubble doesn’t shrink on them.”

Say what you want about Lunardi. He’s got a point.

Lunardi kept saying last year that A&M needed to win the SEC Tournament and make the field. Fair or not, he ended up being right about that, though I’d argue that the Aggies still got hosed because of some of their head-to-head arguments. Go figure that this year’s A&M team might’ve been on the other end of Vandy’s bid snub.

Just like this Vandy squad, A&M’s argument was that it was clearly a different team in the final month-plus of the season. The Aggies entered the SEC Championship having won 8 out of 9 games, but was still being told it had work to do even with a NET ranking of No. 51. There’s zero denying that A&M would’ve had a favorable shot to win a game or 2 had it been able to make the field. Maybe you could say the same about Vandy, even without Liam Robbins.

Lord knows that Vandy is battle tested. You don’t win 10 of your final 12 games in a potential 8-bid league by accident. Jordan Wright became a star, and he was the one who tried to put Vandy on his back facing a 27-point deficit that got cut to 11 late in the second half. How great of a story would it have been to watch Wright, who was Stackhouse’s first recruit at Vandy, lead the Dores all the way back to move on to the SEC Championship in Nashville?

But this is March, and in March, one bad day is all she wrote.

For Vandy, Saturday did feel a bit “do or die.” Sure, there’s still a chance that the Dores will be rewarded for how dangerous they were in the final 5 weeks. There’s still a chance that the selection committee will look beyond the 3 Quad 3-4 losses and it’ll instead reward the No. 30 strength of schedule with 5 Quad 1 wins by giving Vandy with a historic at-large bid, at least in terms of NET.

In all likelihood, though, Stackhouse’s squad will have to take its anger out on the NIT, just as A&M did last year when it lost in the NIT Championship.

We’ll never know if Lunardi’s words would’ve proved prophetic, and if Vandy could’ve done what last year’s A&M squad couldn’t. That is, lock up a bid simply by reaching the SEC Championship. This year’s A&M squad prevented us from getting an answer to that question.

Vandy earned the right to be the story of the week in Nashville. Who knows? Maybe the hometown team will follow in A&M’s footsteps and turn its NCAA Tournament snub into the foundation for a “no doubt about it” résumé heading into The Big Dance next year.

For now, though, it appears Vandy left too much room for doubt — fair or not.