NCAA Tournament Spencer on March 9, 2006 11:08 am
March Madness!!
So, most of the major conferences have started their end of year conference tournaments leading up to the release of the brackets on Sunday. Unfortunately, my beloved Purdue Boilermakers won’t be in the Big Dance again this year. Given that, I am still really excited about the tournament as I am every year.
However, this year will be the first in a long time in which I don’t run a tournament pool and probably won’t participate in one (of course that may change once I get in full swing and if I get enough requests I may run one). This will most likely be a one year hiatus.
Something has gotten me thinking though. The original intent of the NCAA Tournament is to determine the best basketball team in the country. For the most part, I think it does a good job of that. One thing I don’t like is this ‘guaranteed’ bid for all of the smaller conferences. Each winner of a conference tournament automatically gets a bid to NCAA Tournament.
This means that about 20 teams or so that have no chance of getting to the final four, let alone win it get into the tournament and it leaves out many good teams from larger conferences to fight it out in the NIT. Why not change the NCAA format to have only at large bids to determine the field of 64 and then all of the smaller conferences that currently get guaranteed time in a tournament that is clearly outside of their league to make up the NIT Tournament? Really, unless your a fan of the 1 seed in a region, do you really want to see Duke beat up on Fairleigh-Dickinson by 60 points?? Sure, F-D can say that they made it to the big dance, but then they feel like the Broncos when they lost to the 49ers in the Super Bowl.
Of course, on years when a school from a smaller conference is good enough (so you could still have your Cinderella stories), they’d get their bid for the NCAA; but for all the rest, they’d have a much more competitive chance against other smaller conference winners in the NIT.
It also, by extension, makes the NCAA Tournament much more competitive and harder to predict and would allow for the actual real possibility of a 16 seed upsetting a 1 seed in the first round. Still unlikely, but not impossible as it is now.
The NCAA has become such a politically correct entity that they feel obligated to give spots away to each conference, even when most, if not all, have no chance of really making things exciting in a game, let alone for the whole tournament. I would rather see the 64 best teams over about 40 of the best teams, and 25 that have no business being there.
