Belmont and Murray State staged the best game of the entire season Saturday night in the Ohio Valley Conference tournament final. Unfortunately, the wrong team won.
Murray State had a perfect record of 16-0 in conference play this season. Yet, CBS will probably be showing America a room full of dejected Racers next Sunday when the NCAA tournament field is announced. Them’s the breaks when conferences use their end-of-season tournaments to determine which teams get automatic bids to the big dance.
There’s a Murray State or two every year. Likewise, there’s usually a .500-ish team that gets into the field solely by virtue of getting hot and winning a conference tournament. That’s not limited to the smaller, “one-bid” leagues, either — see: Georgia, circa 2008.
Deserving teams get shut out. Meanwhile, we’re letting in riffraff. It’s like leaving Cinderella at home and sending her ugly step sisters to the ball instead.
Is there a way to reform the selection process so that: 1) every conference retains an automatic bid; 2) conference tournaments retain a degree of importance; and 3) conference tournaments aren’t the end-all, be-all in determining who represents a league in the tournament?
My solution: Keep the automatic bids for every conference, but allow the NCAA tournament selection committee to decide which team gets the bid for each conference.
Under this system, the conference tournaments become one piece in the larger mosaic of a team’s season, rather than some kind of golden ticket to the field of 68. Conferences could still use the end-of-year tournaments to determine their champions; they just wouldn’t necessarily determine which teams will represent them in the NCAA tournament.
So, the selection committee can use its discretion to put deserving teams in the field. Or, you can look at it as veto power over undeserving squads sneaking in.
Either way, the end result is a higher-quality group of NCAA tournament teams in a field that better reflects the entirety of a season.
