Yale, Harvard et. al Basketball teams discover they can't get to the Big Dance with a handshake and a smile
>> Thursday
The "apocalypse" as Seth Davis would put it is upon us. The Ivy League is seriously considering holding a postseason conference tournament to decide its bid for the Big Dance.
Now, I didn'a go ta one a'dem reel smurt skools out east, but I really can't see how this would be anything more than a sideways move for the Ivy League, who currently is the only D-1 league to award it's automatic NCAA bid to it's regular season champion after a true round-robin home and home schedule (wistful sigh).
1.) Most sports fans don't give a shit about the Ivy League, Ivy Leaguers give even fewer shits. ie) Name the last NBA prospect to come out of Cornell or Dartmouth.
2.) As Davis points out, hosting first round games at higher-seeded campus sites would drive up ticket revenue, but would lose the charm of a conference tournament bringing all the schools together. Not sure even that would do much better than the 826 people who recently watched Dartmouth and Brown, or even the 6,129 that watched perennial Ivy powers Princeton and Penn square off.
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You get the award for the most awkward post title in the blog's history. Congrats. But yeah, I wish the opposite trend were going on. Fuck conference tourneys. I hate 'em.
For readers who don't remember last year, Syracuse went 7-9 in the Big East last year (including losing their final three regular season games), won the tournament, and got a 5 seed...a fucking 5 seed.
On the other hand, YCS alma mater Marquette had an impressive 10-6 record in regular season play. After a first-round bye, they lost in the second round of the tournament to Georgetown, and received a 7 seed.
Review:
Syracuse: 11-9 in Big East games...becomes the easiest 5-12 upset to pick in recent memory.
Marquette: 10-7 in Big East games...faces a very tough Alabama squad in the first round and goes home early.
...excuse us if we're a little bitter.
That's not to say that our entire hatred for conference tourneys is based on one incident from 2006. There are so many problems with them in general. Especially in small conferences that will never get at-large bids, where tourneys tend to render the entire regular season pretty obsolete.
Major conference tourneys are no better. The obvious differences in motivation level among teams (i.e. some with more motivation to lose than win) horribly skews the results and therefore the perception of the teams involved (Syracuse). In closing, conference tourneys are trash.
(Hmmm...do I smell a full-blown post in a couple weeks?)
Anytime I hear anyone talk about expanding the NCAA tournament, I laugh. How many chances do you need to get in?
You have a whole regular season
A conference tournament where nearly all, if not all the teams get one last shot
A play-in game
Where do we draw the line on "good teams"? Perhaps it's a hard question, but I'd hate to see March Madness become Bowl Season.
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