March Sanity

March sanity is here!! Well, kinda... Basically no one really pays attention to college basketball until the last week. Yea, maybe a few glances at the highlights on ESPN or checking out the standings to make sure their team has a shot at making the 68-team tournament. But aside from that, ratings & ticket sales have never been lower in the history of college basketball. Know why? There are a ton of games that really don't matter too much individually in the regular season. This is what a playoff will give you for those of you who declare yourselves as proud anti-BCS: a weak regular season with teams taking off at the end of the year. Think all the teams in the conference tournaments really go out to play? Yea right. The conference tournaments are for bubble teams to improve their chances of making the tournament, not for teams to change their seed from a 6 to a 5. 

So aside from the upsets, there is a mix between sanity & madness. I'm going to go through each of them to see if we can't change a few things to make the good things even better.

MADNESS

First up, a 96-team tournament. This is a joke. I can't believe anybody would want this! I've only heard 2 people back this & one of them is Charles Barkley. Really? That's a turrible idea, Chuck. Adding another 28 teams may seem like a good idea, but think about it for a NANO-SECOND....it'll come to ya. You're not getting 28 more Dukes, UNC's, OSU's, Pitt's, & Syracuses....you're getting more teams that consist of 4+ letters in their names. Have you seen the play-in games?! Can you honestly name any of these teams without looking them up? UTSA, ALST, UAB, VCU, UNCA, UALR, UCSB, UNCO. I'm guessing most of you can tell me what 1 of these acronyms means, maybe 2. You're diluting the tournament. You're making it less fun to watch because you have 28 more teams that suck. Yea, you'll get the 4 or 5 teams that are dubbed as "snubs" who should've gotten in the tournament. But after that, you get mediocre teams, most below .500 for the year. Do we really want that?

SANITY

If you're just unwilling to accept that only 68 teams needs to be in the tournament, then put in 4 more slots to make it a 72-team tournament. Just have the last 8 teams in play against each other. We don't need any formulas....ooh, their RPI is 12.5354 points higher so they should get in. No. We'll have 8 play-in games. By doing this, we make it harder to get a perfect tournament bracket as well as give the sports analysts less to debate. "How could Alabama get snubbed like that?!" Well, now there are less snubs. Though, being the media, they just go deeper to find a snub list. Think that will go away by just adding teams? Nope. Just like the BCS making an 8-team playoff, or a 12-team playoff: there will always be some teams who get "snubbed" out of the tournament and that's just how it is. Plus the more teams you add, the less impressive the already-pitiful NIT tournament gets.

MADNESS

Conference tournaments. Do we really need them? We can't just make the regular season winner the automatic berth? We need to have all the teams play each other in 3 days when it took 3 weeks to do during the year? The NFL & college football have figured out this principle: sometimes less is more. Conference tournaments make the regular season pointless, ESPECIALLY if you're a team from a smaller conference. Let's say you're a team from the Atlantic-10. Can anyone name me 3 teams from that conference without looking first of all? Didn't think so (but we LOVE underdogs, right?). There are 13 other teams in that conference and you play 16 regular season games. So it's very possible you play the 2nd, 3rd, & 4th-best teams only once during the year. Let's say you play your heart out, end up with a 15-1 record, and win your conference. However, the last game of the year, your star player goes down with an injury that will keep him sidelined for a week and a half. He misses the entire conference tournament. Now, instead of getting an automatic berth for working hard for 2 months, you likely don't get into the tournament because you didn't win your conference AND you're from a smaller conference so your strength of schedule isn't that impressive. UAB got lucky this year, but there's a lot of controversy surrounding them getting in. If NCAA basketball wasn't so down this year, UAB doesn't get in. Think this is fair? Ask a Long Beach State fan.

SANITY

Just get rid of the conference tournaments. Period. If you want a pre-tournament, maybe schedule some mini-tournaments pinning bubble teams against each other. Have a bubble tournament! Just no more conference tournaments and PLEASE no automatic berths to the winners of them. Leave it blank so teams can schedule more non-conference teams.


So let's change some things around so we can concentrate on the madness of the games and not the process by which teams are selected.