Thinking your team qualified for the NCAA Tournament, only to find out they’ve earned a spot in a play-in game, is like being told your team is headed to the World Series, but then you discover they’ve actually won a spot in a stick ball game in the parking lot.
It’s a scam, a flim-flam, a way of cheating teams into thinking they’re going to the big dance, when, in fact, they’ve only earned the right to a dance-off in the lobby with some other poor sap team who also thought they were in, but really weren’t.
Last week, after a near two-decade drought, I watched my alma mater, James Madison University, win the Colonial Athletic Conference Championship, and along with it, an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament – although the bid, as noted above, was not a true bid, rather it was just a bid to play for a bid, which is, to put it in the simplest terms, dumb. Here are four reasons why:
1) Conference champions who earn automatic bids should automatically be seeded in the top 64. Don’t let fans of schools in smaller conferences rush the court, let coaches talk about how it’s been a dream to get to the tourney, and let fan bases spend a week wondering if maybe, just maybe, their squad will be the first 16 to knock off a 1, or one of the few 15s or 14s to win, only to deflate the entire fan base by putting them in a play-in game against a school they’ve never heard of, which leads me to…
2) Know what’s worse than watching a college basketball game that includes a team you don’t know anything about? A college basketball game where you don’t know anything about either team, where there’s no history between either team, and where the players/fans are heading into it already disappointed. If we have to keep the play-in games, then why not co-opt the four smallest conference tournaments like this…
3) I’m not saying this is the best idea, but it’s an idea: Whatever we decide the four smallest, least powerful conferences are, we should assign each of them a 16 seed right out of the gate, then let that conference play for the 16 seed in one of the four regions. This would make each of the finals in those conference tournaments de facto play-in games that actually matter, because not only is the conference title on the line, but a real NCAA tournament bid is on the line as well. But what about the play-in games? Glad you asked…
4) Rather than letting teams think they made the tournament only to discover that they aren’t quite there yet, why not put together a quick 4 team Bubble Bracket Tournament. These could be the proverbial best four teams who got screwed out of a NCAA Tourney bid. Usually, there are several big name programs among them, which would ensure ratings as well as solid story lines and big name coaches. These four teams would then play a two-day tournament, with the winning team earning an 8 or 10 seed (we just save one spot in one region for this team). Now we have the same 68 teams, but with some real excitement involved.
Agree? Disagree? Think I’m an idiot? Let’s go Duke Dogs.
Tweet me at: @Jon_Finkel