The perfect NCAA tournament
Posted on 08. Mar, 2010 at 4:00 am by Meerkat in Basketball, Gambling, NCAA Basketball
With all this chatter about the NCAA expanding to a 96 team tournament, well, I just gotta shake my head. Why mess with something that is not broken. Not just not broken, but considered the best tournament of all tournaments. Seriously, it works, don’t F with it.
But no. Rumblings about expanding are running rampant across all media outlets.
How sad. The NCAA tournament is seemingly this perfect alignment of drama, gambling, entertainment, and awesome hoops. Why F with this?!
So now I must dive into this mess and give the solution the NCAA should adopt as gospel … to fix what they will eventually F up.
Here we go …
Actually the tournament is not perfect (so I just contradicted myself … whatever, there are worse crimes, like being a Duke fan for example). The monkey wrench in the whole tournament selection process is the awarding of automatic berths via teams winning conference tournaments. Simply illogical. The school that has the best conference record at the end of the regular season should be given the auto berth to the tourney. But the problem is that these conf tourneys are cash cows. So if there is no carrot at the end of these tourneys, well, there is no point. Hence, the auto berth. Stupid. Why give a berth to a team that got hot at the end of the season instead of a team that kicked ass over two whole months? Hmph!
This auto conf tourney berth problem is the main reason guys like Dickie V are whining on selection Sunday about teams getting left out of the 65. Why? Because some mid-major wins their conf tourney when they are not expected to, giving the selection committee the tough decision of … who do we leave out … the mediocre big school … or the mid-major who should have won their conf tourney but didn’t.
With 31 auto conf berths … that leaves the committee 34 at-large bids.
So let’s break it down. Because the big confs are gonna get multiples obviously. I shall use Joey Brackets latest post for a reference (do not make fun of Joey Lunardi … he is the man).
These teams are locks after the conf winners …
BIG 12: gets 5 (after Kansas)Â 34 – 5 = 29
BIG East: gets 4 (after Syracuse) 29 – 4 = 25
BIG 10: gets 3 (after Purdue) 25 – 3 = 22
ACC: gets 2 (after Duke) 22 – 2 = 20
MWC: gets 1 (after New Mexico) 20 – 1 = 19
Okay, so that basically leaves a bunch of squads that dropped out of the top 25.
WTF.
Every year, some mid-major wins a tourney they shouldn’t so now the committee has to put that school IN and now decide, should the team that should have won their tourney be IN or some above avg major school be IN? Huh. This is when Dickie V flashes on the ESPN split screen and starts waving his hands all over the place because he can’t believe the NCAA left this ____ team OUT. What I can’t stand about Vitale is that he usually doesn’t say who SHOULD be left out. I will admit he has gotten better the last couple of years, but one year Fowler (way back when Fowler worked some hoops) and Vitale got into a heated volley about this and Fowler made complete sense and Vitale didn’t … no shocker.
Alright, I will cease my Vitale pounding for now. He is a great ambassador for the game, he just annoys me from time to time.
Let’s believe for a second in a world of NO CONF TOURNAMENTS.
That would be nice. Because the idea of the 96 team tournament would work then. Yup.
Allow in your 31 auto berths. Easy.
Now choose the next 65 ranked teams.
65? Oh, so you simply have a first round of at-large games before we get to the teams that won their conf tourneys. Brilliant! Meaning all of the regular season conf champs get a 1st rnd bye. Makes perfect sense … at least to me.
Wow. Wasn’t that easy?!
In a world of Jay Bilas being god … yes, that is easy to believe.
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Problem is that there is no way the confs will let go of their cash cow conf tourneys. So we will always be stuck without a perfect system. Hence the chatter about this expansion. The schools want their cake (conf tourneys) and eat it too (berths into big dance).
Now I’m not gonna sit here and say the conf tourneys are boring because that certainly ain’t so. I myself have had my hands on two conf game-ending basketballs after storming the court to celebrate Delaware tournament-winning games (obviously the years the conf tourney was there in Newark). Great times. And I actually have one of those basketballs in my possession.
Back to the matter at hand.
So obviously the NCAA is not gonna get rid of all the conf tourneys, that is why expansion is being talked about. It’s all about those teams that get left out because of those teams that win the conf tourneys when they shouldn’t. Let’s let those teams at least GET IN so nobody loses face. So maybe less coaches get fired. So maybe more kids get happy because THEY GOT IN. Gee. Whoopee!
Not the right reason to do this. It merely waters down the whole tournament.
But what is worse is that it WATERS DOWN THE REGULAR SEASON!
Great. So guys like me (yeah, I know there are few of us) that actually watch NCAA hoops from November to March are left scratching our heads.
Angry.
That is the emotion I feel because now my enjoyment of November and December is nullified because some cash hungry assess have ruined the time I watch NCAA hoops when nobody else does (and ridiculously ironic because there is no NCAA football playoff yet!).
Meaning, why should ESPN televise those NOV-DEC NCAA basketball games in the future when they mean absolutely nothing. Yeah, I can now see ESPN picking up NHL hockey again because of this 96 team expansion. Wonderful. Those great early season NCAA games and tournaments not televised because … who cares … 96 teams are gonna be in a tournament. Most people feel that way now. So now guys like me are gonna wanna row in that same boat.
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