March is the one month out of the year when all sports take a backseat to college basketball.
Before punching a ticket to the Big Dance, however, teams must win their respective conference tournaments to gain automatic entry to the NCAAs. Otherwise, they have to sweat it out on Selection Sunday to see if they can sneak into the tourney through one of 34 at-large spots.
The current 65-team NCAA Tournament format is perfect and shouldn’t be changed, but the conference tournaments need to go.
A total of 30 NCAA Division I conferences host a tournament consisting of more than half of the teams from the league playing in a single-elimination competition format — with the Ivy League being the one exception. The winner receives a share of the conference championship and an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament.
My reasons for getting rid of the conference tournaments are simple.
First off, No. 1 seeds in postseason tournaments for the six BCS conferences are almost guaranteed an at-large spot in the NCAA Tournament, should they fall in the conference tourney, by virtue of the perceived strength of their conferences.
It’s also a big risk for coaches to play their best players in a tournament that doesn’t matter when there is a chance they could get injured.
In 2000, Cincinnati lost star player Kenyon Martin, the consensus National Player of the Year, to a broken leg during the Conference USA Tournament. The loss of Martin ended Cincinnati’s hopes of a Final Four run and the team was eliminated in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
In the past, coaches like North Carolina’s Roy Williams and Connecticut’s Jim Calhoun have rested their players during the conference tournament to prepare for the NCAA Tournament. This waters down the level of competition in these tournaments because it results in undeserving teams receiving automatic bids to the NCAAs.
The second problem with the conference tournament is that the winners become conference co-champions with the regular season champion. Conference co-champions?
Since 1994, the Big West Conference has had co-champions eight times.
In the 1999-00 season, Long Beach State (24-6, 15-1) finished first in the Big West and won the conference regular season title, but a loss in the conference tournament landed the 49ers a spot in the lowly National Invitational Tournament.
Conference tournaments are like a get out of jail free card for teams that played mediocre ball during the regular season. Teams can get hot and play well for three or four days to win the conference tournament and get an automatic bid, taking a spot away from a deserving team that showed consistency throughout the season.
The 16-team Big East sends all its members to the conference tournament, meaning last-place DePaul can still make the Big Dance despite having only one Big East win all season.
In the 2008 SEC Tournament, Georgia (17-16, 4-12) earned a spot in the NCAA Tournament. The No. 14-seed Bulldogs lost in the first round to No. 3-seed Xavier, 73-61.
The tournament should be replaced by a conference championship game. The two teams with the best records in each conference could fight it out to determine the conference champion.
Who doesn’t want to watch the Big 12 Conference title come down to a winner-takes-all game between No. 2 Kansas and No. 5 Kansas State, or No. 1 Syracuse facing No. 9 Villanova for the Big East Championship?
The conference championship game would be a factor in NCAA Tournament seeding, with the best teams playing each other to see who deserves the top seeds.
It would be a perfect warm up for March Madness, but more importantly, the championship game would mean something.