Conference Tournaments
Posted by: Bradley McDonald
Purple Eagles. Blue Jays. Monarchs. Golden Knights. Quakers . Mocs. Colonels. Zags.
Sounds more like Alice in Wonderland characters than teams in the NCAA tournament, but that's what they are. Nine teams have received automatic bids already by winning their conference tournaments.
Michael Bradley argues that the conference tournaments aren't fair:
I'll take the exhilaration and competition of the conference tournaments, even if the result is somewhat unfair to a few teams.
Purple Eagles. Blue Jays. Monarchs. Golden Knights. Quakers . Mocs. Colonels. Zags.
Sounds more like Alice in Wonderland characters than teams in the NCAA tournament, but that's what they are. Nine teams have received automatic bids already by winning their conference tournaments.
Michael Bradley argues that the conference tournaments aren't fair:
The NCAA hoops' championship method may appear unassailable, but the roundball world isn't without its own sham of a system: the conference tournaments.It's true that the conference tournaments may be "made-for-TV" and some teams that may deserve to get in the NCAA Tournament are held out because of a non-deserving conference tournament champion, but to compare it to the BCS is absurd. The BCS denies teams that have a legitimate shot at winning the National Championship that chance. In basketball, no team outside of the field of 65 has even a remote possibility of making it through the bracket to a National Championship game. That's a huge difference.
....
They're a joke. That's right, a laugh-out-loud, wet-your-pants, do-a-spit-take joke. Instead of choosing champions the way most sports do, by allowing their members to play a round-robin (or a facsimile in bloated confederations) and crowning the team with the best record, conferences stage three and four-day tournaments that are equal parts game show and made-for-TV carnival. You might get the real champion, provided the top seed survives three days of assaults from zealous underdogs intoxicated by the idea of "getting hot at the right time" and earning a precious NCAA invitation. But if the star guard's girlfriend breaks up with him on the eve of the semifinals, or if a bad clam turns the starting power forward's intestinal track to jelly, two months of hard work go into the hopper.
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Football Tech may have finished 16-11 overall and 7-9 in conference play, but it can still get into the round of 65 with a couple of tourney wins, usually over equally marginal teams. Yippee! Now the Big East has seven schools in. Meanwhile, in the Mid-American Conference, a 24-4 club gets ready to host an NIT contest because it didn't win the conference tournament.
...
Suddenly, the BCS doesn't look so bad. OK, it still does, but at least it has some company.
I'll take the exhilaration and competition of the conference tournaments, even if the result is somewhat unfair to a few teams.
