SWC75
Bored Historian
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- Aug 26, 2011
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I’m always thinking outside the box, (us blockheads have to), and I’m always being told “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. But even things that aren’t broken could be redesigned to function better. I can’t help imagining alternative formats for the NCAA tournament so here goes.
1) The purpose of the tournament is to determine who the best team in the country is by having the best play the best. The best way to do that is to make it a 16 team straight invitational, put them in four 4 team pods and have each pod play a round robin, like an Olympic pool. You play double headers for three nights. If you wind up in with tie, there will be either two 2-1 teams or three with an 0-3 team. In the first instance you play one more game on the 4th night. In the second instance, the two lower seeded tie teams play on night four and the winner plays the highest seeded tied team on night five. Then you do the final four the same way.
The Downside:
Networks, arenas and hotels won’t like the uncertain schedule. The championship might be won by a team in the stands, watching the last team that could have tied them go down losing to somebody else. Not everyone will have a team from their area in the tournament. There will be no Cinderella teams and shock-the-world upsets. The 52 teams that would be invited under the current format but wouldn’t be in this one would have to play in other tournaments, which would then proliferate. They would be like bowl games. Would anybody care about them? Would players opt out of them?
The Upside: The winner will much more certainly be the best team in the country than in a single elimination tournament with teams you’ve never heard of in it. And you’d get the best teams in the country going head-to-head like mountain rams. This year’s Final Four Might feature Gonzaga vs. Michigan and Baylor vs. Illinois the first night, Gonzaga vs. Baylor and Michigan vs. Illinois the second night and Gonzaga vs. Illinois and Michigan vs. Baylor the third night. A powerful team could survive an off-shooting night, foul trouble or a star’s twisted ankle and still be alive to win the tournament. Also, we don’t have to parse blind resumes of mediocre teams to see who should be in and who should be out.
2) There should be four polls: the writer’s, the coaches, the computers, and the fans. The computers would be any math formula that is a serious attempt to rank teams, even if it includes margin of victory. The fans would be the seasons ticket holders of the Division 1 schools who, presumably, like SU use PINS for ordering tickets. The same PINS could be used to verify that the submission was from a season ticket holder and was his only submittal. They could be routed through the schools who would confirm the source and then sent on to a central location for tallying. Each, writer, coach, computer or fan would submit a Top 64 and each category would collate the submittals on a 64 points for 1st, 63 for 2nd, 62 for 3rd bases and then issue a combined Top 64 from that source. Then the four polls would be collated in the same way for an overall Top 64. The result could be the 64 teams in the tournament. Lets get the writers, coaches, computers and fans all equally involved. I don’t see a Downside here, other than it’s more complicated. But it could certainly done and I think it would be more meaningful and fun. And the decisions wouldn’t be made in a closed room by a handful of people.
3) Whoever decides who gets in should consider caliber of opposition at the time the game was played as well as eventually achievements, the location of the game and the margin of victory. People are afraid of ‘running up the score’ if margin of victory is included but basketball isn’t a game where that really happens, except if a player runs in and dunks as everyone else is walking off the court. Teams are always trying to score unless they are protecting a lead in the final couple of minutes. And maybe we could calibrate the quality of opposition on a more specific basis than ‘quads’. You could have a point system for acknowledging a team’s ranking, similar to what I use in “Against Ranked teams” or have tiers of ten teams at a time. A team ranked 38ths isn’t really at the same level as a team ranked 62nd, regardless of where a game is played.
4) Let’s give automatic bids to both the regular season champions, (or any teams that tied for it) and the conference tournament champions. The regular season is a better test of a team than a single elimination tournament. The conference tournament would be a second chance for teams not certain to be in the NCAA tournament to get in while the top teams look to improve their seeding. Obviously, we’ve already got that with the top conferences, but the ‘one bid’ conferences should become two bid conferences when the regular season champion doesn’t win the conference tournament. What would that look like now? I went over the standings and counted the teams that would have won or tied the regular season standings.
2020–21 NCAA Division I men's basketball season
I decided to count only the losses because of the uneven number of games played, which inflates this number a bit. I counted 46 teams from 31 conferences. Then I decided to look at 2020, (when we did finish the regular season), for a comparison. That was 42 teams, to it’s not far from normal. I checked the winners of the conference tournaments and found 17 of them that did not win or tie for the regular season title. That’s a total of 63 automatic bids for a 64(68) team tournament. But what if we expanded the tournament to have 32 play-in games, (96 total) instead of just 4? Or created a whole extra round by pushing it to 128 teams. Then we could absorb all the extra automatic bids and still have plenty of at-large bids. This would place a lot of emphasis on conference competition as a lead-in to the Big Dance. And teams who had great regular season wouldn’t see them totally spoiled by conference tournament losses which prevent them from getting to compete for the national title. The Downside: What does that do to the NIT, the CBI and the CIT tournaments?
5) Why do we need the NIT, (National Invitation), CBI (College Basketball Invitational) or the CIT, (College Insider.com) tournaments? Does anybody remember who plays in them or who wins them other than the teams that do? Do the fans of those schools remember such seasons with any fondness? The NIT was once a full-scale rival or even superior to the NCAA tournament. But that ended decades ago. The CBI and CIT and are so obscure that many people reading this probably never heard of them. Why not put those teams in an expanded NCAA tournament? I’m sure they’d rather be there.
6) Can we clear out the conferences and teams that are never going to win anything? Yes, upsets are fun but the purpose of divisions in sports is to give everyone a shot at a championship. A middleweight might be able to beat a heavyweight but if boxing eliminated divisions, you’d have never heard of most of the guys in Canastota. I look at the standings:
www.espn.com
and I do not see a justification for the Atlantic Sun, American East, Big Sky, Big South, Big West, Colonial, Horizon, Metro Atlantic, Mideast, Northeast, Ohio Valley, Southern, Southland, Southwest Athletic, Summit and Sun Belt conferences to be there. They should either be in a basketball version of FCS or in Division II. Let’s see Colgate play Winthrop for the national championship!
7) Finally, why not just through everyone into the pot? When people hear this suggested they think it’s a crazy idea that could never be done. There are 340 Division 1 teams. You rank them 1-340. Have the bottom 84 teams play teams #173-256 in the first round. Then you have 256 teams pair up to play 128 games and the 128 winners to play 64 games. That gets you down to a 64 team field. I’d have, (in a non-Covid year), the first three rounds be played in the arena of the higher seeded team. Then we can go to the regionals and pass out the brackets in the office. The first three rounds could be done in a week. It’s only three extra games, which is not a terrible load in basketball.
The Downside is that the conference tournaments, which feature some do the best basketball played all year, are now meaningless except for seeding. Maybe they wouldn’t bother with them. Perhaps seeding could be partially based on winning those tournaments and winning the conference regular season titles. The upside is that there would be no bracketologists, no quads, no last four in, no last four out, no snubs, no blind resumes, no coaches being fired because they didn’t make the tournament, etc. There could be some minor griping about the seeding but how much would you care if you excepted to be the #180 team and playing the #333 teams in the first round and instead you were seeded #185 and playing the #328 team in the first round.
It would be all about playing the games and seeing if you can win them. Nothing else.
Hookay…back into the box. (Sound of whip snapping. )
1) The purpose of the tournament is to determine who the best team in the country is by having the best play the best. The best way to do that is to make it a 16 team straight invitational, put them in four 4 team pods and have each pod play a round robin, like an Olympic pool. You play double headers for three nights. If you wind up in with tie, there will be either two 2-1 teams or three with an 0-3 team. In the first instance you play one more game on the 4th night. In the second instance, the two lower seeded tie teams play on night four and the winner plays the highest seeded tied team on night five. Then you do the final four the same way.
The Downside:
Networks, arenas and hotels won’t like the uncertain schedule. The championship might be won by a team in the stands, watching the last team that could have tied them go down losing to somebody else. Not everyone will have a team from their area in the tournament. There will be no Cinderella teams and shock-the-world upsets. The 52 teams that would be invited under the current format but wouldn’t be in this one would have to play in other tournaments, which would then proliferate. They would be like bowl games. Would anybody care about them? Would players opt out of them?
The Upside: The winner will much more certainly be the best team in the country than in a single elimination tournament with teams you’ve never heard of in it. And you’d get the best teams in the country going head-to-head like mountain rams. This year’s Final Four Might feature Gonzaga vs. Michigan and Baylor vs. Illinois the first night, Gonzaga vs. Baylor and Michigan vs. Illinois the second night and Gonzaga vs. Illinois and Michigan vs. Baylor the third night. A powerful team could survive an off-shooting night, foul trouble or a star’s twisted ankle and still be alive to win the tournament. Also, we don’t have to parse blind resumes of mediocre teams to see who should be in and who should be out.
2) There should be four polls: the writer’s, the coaches, the computers, and the fans. The computers would be any math formula that is a serious attempt to rank teams, even if it includes margin of victory. The fans would be the seasons ticket holders of the Division 1 schools who, presumably, like SU use PINS for ordering tickets. The same PINS could be used to verify that the submission was from a season ticket holder and was his only submittal. They could be routed through the schools who would confirm the source and then sent on to a central location for tallying. Each, writer, coach, computer or fan would submit a Top 64 and each category would collate the submittals on a 64 points for 1st, 63 for 2nd, 62 for 3rd bases and then issue a combined Top 64 from that source. Then the four polls would be collated in the same way for an overall Top 64. The result could be the 64 teams in the tournament. Lets get the writers, coaches, computers and fans all equally involved. I don’t see a Downside here, other than it’s more complicated. But it could certainly done and I think it would be more meaningful and fun. And the decisions wouldn’t be made in a closed room by a handful of people.
3) Whoever decides who gets in should consider caliber of opposition at the time the game was played as well as eventually achievements, the location of the game and the margin of victory. People are afraid of ‘running up the score’ if margin of victory is included but basketball isn’t a game where that really happens, except if a player runs in and dunks as everyone else is walking off the court. Teams are always trying to score unless they are protecting a lead in the final couple of minutes. And maybe we could calibrate the quality of opposition on a more specific basis than ‘quads’. You could have a point system for acknowledging a team’s ranking, similar to what I use in “Against Ranked teams” or have tiers of ten teams at a time. A team ranked 38ths isn’t really at the same level as a team ranked 62nd, regardless of where a game is played.
4) Let’s give automatic bids to both the regular season champions, (or any teams that tied for it) and the conference tournament champions. The regular season is a better test of a team than a single elimination tournament. The conference tournament would be a second chance for teams not certain to be in the NCAA tournament to get in while the top teams look to improve their seeding. Obviously, we’ve already got that with the top conferences, but the ‘one bid’ conferences should become two bid conferences when the regular season champion doesn’t win the conference tournament. What would that look like now? I went over the standings and counted the teams that would have won or tied the regular season standings.
2020–21 NCAA Division I men's basketball season
I decided to count only the losses because of the uneven number of games played, which inflates this number a bit. I counted 46 teams from 31 conferences. Then I decided to look at 2020, (when we did finish the regular season), for a comparison. That was 42 teams, to it’s not far from normal. I checked the winners of the conference tournaments and found 17 of them that did not win or tie for the regular season title. That’s a total of 63 automatic bids for a 64(68) team tournament. But what if we expanded the tournament to have 32 play-in games, (96 total) instead of just 4? Or created a whole extra round by pushing it to 128 teams. Then we could absorb all the extra automatic bids and still have plenty of at-large bids. This would place a lot of emphasis on conference competition as a lead-in to the Big Dance. And teams who had great regular season wouldn’t see them totally spoiled by conference tournament losses which prevent them from getting to compete for the national title. The Downside: What does that do to the NIT, the CBI and the CIT tournaments?
5) Why do we need the NIT, (National Invitation), CBI (College Basketball Invitational) or the CIT, (College Insider.com) tournaments? Does anybody remember who plays in them or who wins them other than the teams that do? Do the fans of those schools remember such seasons with any fondness? The NIT was once a full-scale rival or even superior to the NCAA tournament. But that ended decades ago. The CBI and CIT and are so obscure that many people reading this probably never heard of them. Why not put those teams in an expanded NCAA tournament? I’m sure they’d rather be there.
6) Can we clear out the conferences and teams that are never going to win anything? Yes, upsets are fun but the purpose of divisions in sports is to give everyone a shot at a championship. A middleweight might be able to beat a heavyweight but if boxing eliminated divisions, you’d have never heard of most of the guys in Canastota. I look at the standings:
Men's College Basketball Standings, 2019-20 season - ESPN
Visit ESPN for the complete 2019-20 NCAAM season standings. Includes league, conference and division standings for regular season and playoffs.
7) Finally, why not just through everyone into the pot? When people hear this suggested they think it’s a crazy idea that could never be done. There are 340 Division 1 teams. You rank them 1-340. Have the bottom 84 teams play teams #173-256 in the first round. Then you have 256 teams pair up to play 128 games and the 128 winners to play 64 games. That gets you down to a 64 team field. I’d have, (in a non-Covid year), the first three rounds be played in the arena of the higher seeded team. Then we can go to the regionals and pass out the brackets in the office. The first three rounds could be done in a week. It’s only three extra games, which is not a terrible load in basketball.
The Downside is that the conference tournaments, which feature some do the best basketball played all year, are now meaningless except for seeding. Maybe they wouldn’t bother with them. Perhaps seeding could be partially based on winning those tournaments and winning the conference regular season titles. The upside is that there would be no bracketologists, no quads, no last four in, no last four out, no snubs, no blind resumes, no coaches being fired because they didn’t make the tournament, etc. There could be some minor griping about the seeding but how much would you care if you excepted to be the #180 team and playing the #333 teams in the first round and instead you were seeded #185 and playing the #328 team in the first round.
It would be all about playing the games and seeing if you can win them. Nothing else.
Hookay…back into the box. (Sound of whip snapping. )
