I mean you can slice and dice this any number of ways, really just how you want to. But let's tackle what former Wake Pitcher, Army AD, and Tourney Chair said...
ACC SERIES WINS: Only 4 series wins, 1 vs a team in the field (GT). Well let's take a look at some of those other teams in our own conference who made it. Wake Forest, 3 series wins, 1 vs a team in the field since State didn't make it (also GT) good enough to earn a 2. Now series wins are important, and a differentiator, but you can't tell me going on the road and taking 1 from VT is a negative and meaningless since you didn't beat them 2 of 3. Other bubble teams like FSU, GT faired better here winning multiple ACC high profile series. But you overall went +.500 in the conference including the ACCT and had at least a win against every ACC team you played outside of ND.
NON CONFERENCE SOS: It isn't good, from a numbers perspective, 189. And if you look at all the teams they were differentiating between at the end, its clear we were on the wrong side of that particular metric. But what did you do OOC? Does beating a Top 8 seed (LOL) in ECU twice, once at their place and once at home not count because the aggregate number isn't high? In most cases you played regional schools, so what's the real anchor here? Quinnipiac, a NE team who has been good who wasn't this year? Radford, a local school you can schedule a series with during your ACC off week? We got beat by Northeastern but even they've been good and their metrics aren't awful. We certainly didn't challenge ourselves by playing like Arkansas or Tennessee but we didn't seek out bad opponents either and had some games cancelled due to weather. You play in the best conference in baseball, and this is only held up at random. It doesn't affect Tennessee's resume that they had a 225 OOC SOS, Arkansas either with a 250 OOC SOS. And while the OOC SOS was bad, once again the overall SOS, you know your entire resume, was 26th. Not exactly a stat filled with cupcakes.
This team is good enough and earned a seat at the table and were speared by a random number, when all the other random numbers were ok.