There's really no good solution. You have to pick up big wins to make the tournament as an at-large, and smaller schools have very few of those opportunities, and those are almost exclusively on the road. Meanwhile, bigger schools have a built in chance for quad 1 wins in 3/4 of their games. Of course a school like Duke has 5 quad 1 wins. They play several elite teams at home every year. If you are even a decent team, it's fairly easy to rack up a handful of quality wins. Furman would have had to beat Auburn or Alabama, Wofford and USF to even be on the bubble at like 28-3, which is insane. Those three losses were killer, with the former two being a chance at a major quad 1 road win, and the latter two being our two quad 3 losses.