There’s an off-court aspect to yesterday’s big college basketball story, in which Syracuse announced a self-imposed postseason ban. In this space, however, we’ll address an on-court topic connected to Wednesday’s news.
As a result of the Orange removing themselves from postseason play, the 2015 ACC Tournament will shrink from a 15-team field to a 14-team field. What this means for the bracket in Greensboro, N.C., is that the 10-versus-15 opening-round game will be wiped off the docket. The first day of play in Greensboro — Wednesday at the ACC Tournament — will move from a three-game slate to a two-game docket. The only games that day will be the 11-14 and 12-13 games. The 11-14 winner will play the 6 seed in the second round on Thursday. The 12-13 winner will face the 5 seed in the second round.
These adjustments to the ACC bracket magnify — and once again bring to light — one of the more absurd aspects of Championship Week (which is more properly referred to as “Championship Fortnight,” since the conference tournaments do occupy two weeks rather than only one). It’s something college basketball — a sport in search of ways to spice up its regular season — could address if it wanted to:
Don’t extend automatic conference tournament invitations to every team in your conference.
This should be a no-brainer for the conferences, especially the power leagues with 12, 14, or (in the ACC’s case) 15 teams. Yet, the idea has not gained traction.
It should, at least if college basketball wants to inject more juice and excitement into the whole of its regular season, which so many casual sports fans choose to discount, believing that March is the only month that matters in this sport.
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You might have read the other day at Bloguin partner site Awful Announcing that the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee will not have a weekly show announcing mock brackets and seedings for the NCAA tournament. We’re all grateful for that, but tucked inside that story is a clear intent on the part of movers and shakers in college basketball to continuously explore ways of making the regular season more interesting and relevant.
Well, there’s an obvious way to do this — one not tied to the idea of moving the season from a November-March (early April) arc to a January-May arc. The answer: Cut down the size of conference tournament fields, specifically the elimination of play-in or preliminary-round games. This is what the Syracuse story — responsible for removing one preliminary-round game from the ACC tournament — can potentially mean for the on-court product of college basketball.
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It’s not complicated in some cases: In a league with nine to 11 teams, only eight should compete in the conference tournament. Get rid of the 7-10 and 8-9 play-in games.
In a league with 14 or more teams, get rid of the 11-14 and 12-13 play-in games. Keep the No. 13 and 14 teams home.
A 12-team league, on the other hand, offers the tricky decision: You have a clean tournament setup, but should you — as a conference — want to expose your 5 through 8 seeds (very likely bubble teams) to bad loss possibilities while giving your 9 through 12 seeds (very likely non-bubble teams) a chance to create some bracket havoc? That’s a tough call.
The point of emphasis belongs on the leagues without 12 and only 12 teams. If leagues don’t have exactly 12 teams, they need to ask themselves a series of questions.
Why not save transportation costs and the sight of empty seats for drowsy first-day games at a neutral-site tournament? How can, for instance, the SEC regard it as a plus that its four worst teams have to travel to a neutral site and play Wednesday afternoon or early-evening games? SEC Tournament Wednesday is the single most depressing spectacle of Championship Week. It’s a day when the reality of postseason basketball turns March Madness into March Sadness. That’s not what the sport is about. The SEC should keep 13 and 14 home, sparing us an extra day of bad basketball. How does first-round Wednesday improve the on-court product?
The reason this move — if adopted — would improve the regular season is obvious: Teams at the bottom of conferences would have a tangible goal to shoot for. Teams at the top of a conference are playing for titles and high seeds. Teams in the middle third of a league are often on the bubble, just trying to make the Big Dance. Teams at the bottom could run out of reasons to compete in the middle of February. Not giving all teams an automatic conference tournament berth would spice up the dozens of games played by lower-tier teams in power leagues.
It should be seen as a good thing in ACC circles that we won’t see 10th-seeded Miami versus 15th-seeded Virginia Tech on Wednesday of Championship Week in Greensboro. Hypothetically, it should be seen as a good thing that we wouldn’t have to see seventh-seeded Kansas State versus 10th-seeded Texas Tech in the Big 12 tournament. (Currently, though, we will face that very possibility.) Texas Tech and TCU, the two teams at the bottom of the Big 12, should be given an incentive to try to push ahead to the eighth-place slot in the league. If they’re able to overcome Texas, they can then play in the Big 12 tournament. The Longhorns would stay home and would (under such a circumstance) rightly be deprived of the chance to play their way into the NCAA tournament as an at-large team by facing top-seeded Kansas in the Big 12 quarterfinals.
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What could happen in the Big 12 could happen in other conference tournaments, specifically the Big East, which — just like the Big 12 — happens to have 10 teams. If Marquette or Creighton, at the bottom of the league, could overtake St. John’s for eighth place, it would only be right that St. John’s would be deprived of a possible chance to play its way into the NCAA tournament by drawing top-seeded Villanova in the Big East tournament quarterfinals.
When you realize that conferences across the country could introduce a new layer of competitive intrigue to their regular seasons, the idea of lopping off the final two or three teams from bloated conference tournaments makes all the sense in the world.
Syracuse has removed a 10-versus-15 play-in game from the ACC tournament, sparing us a bad basketball game. This probably won’t be a catalyst for reform… but it could be, if people in positions of influence took the hint.
