The Living Room Times

Continuing on with the discussion in my prior tweets and links and longer blog posts about the possibility of NCAA Tournament expansion, I want to expand on something I proposed in comments the other day.

If the NCAA is absolutely dead set on expansion, there’s a right way to do it, and a wrong way. The wrong way is to create a haphazard-feeling play-in round, with bizarre, uninteresting, and out-of-place matchups like #9 vs. #24 playing for the right to take on #8 (who cares?!), and #16 vs. #17 — both mid-level NIT teams in the present system — vying for the right to challenge #1. This setup would fail to reward teams on the top 4 seed lines for their excellent seasons because, instead of round-of-64 matchups against low-major auto bid teams that have little chance of winning, they’d get relatively solid, mid-60s RPI type teams, coming off big wins. At the same time, it would fail to give those low-major teams a chance at the truly magical, Hampton-esque moments that are the very best thing about the tournament.

Think about it: If, rather than being a #15 seed stunning a #2 with legit national-title ambitions, Hampton had been a #23 seed and had merely beaten a #10 seed — the sixth-place team in the Big 12, say, instead of its champion — who would remember it?

The right way to do expansion — the way to preserve the opportunity for unforgettably magical One Shining Moments like the one shown above, which are what make March Madness so special — is to do something like this:

Instead of expanding the field to 96 as such, replace the “opening round game” (i.e., the play-in game) with an actual opening round — a round that, crucially, isn’t considered part of the tournament, but rather is a final prerequisite for all potential at-large teams to make the tournament in the first place.

Since there are 31 auto bids, we need 33 at-larges for a 64-team tournament. So, have the committee select the 66 best teams that didn’t receive automatic bids — everyone from whichever two teams out of the Kansas-Texas-KState trifecta don’t win the Big 12 tourney, all the way down to BCS-conference mediocrities like Notre Dame and iffy mid-majors like Wichita State — seed those teams from #1 to #66, and match them up in 33 unbracketed opening-round games (1 vs. 66, 2 vs. 65, etc.). Then take the 33 winners, call them “NCAA Tournament at-large teams,” throw them into the field with the 31 auto bid winners, re-seed the entire field into a proper 64-team bracket (so a top-notch at-large team like Kansas/Texas/K-State could still get a #1 seed, and the auto-bid bottom feeders like Morehead State would still be #16 seeds), and go from there.

This, to my delight and Andrew’s chagrin, would preserve the frequent lopsidedness — but occasional absolute Hampton-style magic — of the games between #1-4 seeds and #13-16 seeds, since #s 13-16 would still be lowly auto-bid teams, as God intended. 🙂 Yet meanwhile, Andrew, and others who feel there aren’t enough competitive games in the early rounds, would still get their desired extra round of potential upsets, since the highest level teams (with the exception, basically, of the six auto-bid winners from the BCS conferences) would be playing in the opening round against teams whom they’d periodically lose to — and they’d have to win those games in order to call themselves “tournament teams,” and earn the right to play the Morehead State type teams in the first round of the actual tournament (i.e., the round of 64).

My scheme would somewhat (though not entirely) restore the old notion of the NCAA Tournament being a “tournament of champions.” Conference champs like, say, a Morehead State would actually get an advantage over a non-champion like, say, a Kansas team that loses to Texas or K-State in the Big 12 tourney. Morehead would automatically be in the tournament from the get-go, while the Jayhawks would have an extra hurdle to clear (i.e., winning an opening-round game over a Notre Dame-type team). If you’re a conference championship purist, this is a feature, not a bug. At-larges can join the party, but only when they’ve earned their way in — they don’t just get selected in by a committee, they’ve gotta win a game to get in (and it’s not that easy of a game).

Mid-major-haters and other non-tournament-of-champions-purists may say this isn’t “fair” to the Kansases of the world, teams from tough conferences like the Big 12 or Big East, for whom winning an auto bid is more challenging than it is for a team like Morehead State. To which I say: gimme a break. The Kansases and Kentuckys have more structural advantages over the Moreheads and Chattanoogas than you can possibly imagine. There’s nothing “unfair” about rewarding conference champions for being champions, and if this gives a tiny leg up to teams below the Red Line, it’s still like pissing into a hurricane in the grand scheme of things. If Kansas or Syracuse or Villanova or Kentucky is as good as you think they are, surely they can win one extra piddly little game to prove it. It’s simple: they gotta either win their conference tournament, or they gotta win an extra game against a team they should (but aren’t guaranteed to) beat. Once they do that, they’re in, they’re seeded properly, and they’ve got the same national championship shot as everyone else.

Having said that, I will happily concede — and again, I think this is a feature, not a bug — that my setup would probably increase somewhat (but not too much, IMHO) the number of upsets in the eventual #1-4 vs. #13-16 games during the round-of-64, for two reasons: (1) the quality of teams on the #1-4 lines would be slightly diluted, since you’d always lose a few teams in opening-round upsets that were otherwise destined for high seeds; and (2) perhaps more importantly, those #1-4 seeds who were at-larges (and thus had to survive an opening-round game) would be playing on short rest as compared to #13-16s, who would almost always be auto bids. Don’t think Morehead has a shot against Kansas? Neither do I — but if the Jayhawks, regular-season but not tournament champions of the Big 12, are running on fumes while their lowly opponents are well-rested, the odds increase slightly, certainly of a competitive game, and occasionally of a stunning upset. Which would be great for the tournament as a whole.

My system would also solve a major objection to expansion: the specter of mediocre-to-bad teams *cough*FireMikeBrey*cough* being able to rest on their flimsy laurels and claim they had a quasi-successful season by saying, in the height of lameness, “we made the tournament” by being in the field of 96. No, you didn’t: you only “make the tournament” if you either: 1) win your conference tournament, or 2) win your opening-round game.

Heck, if desired, in order to further emphasize that the opening round is separate and distinct from The Dance, the opening-round losers can be shunted over to the NIT. This would have the side effect of making the NIT more interesting to casual fans because, instead of being purely made of mediocrities, it’d have the occasional Kansas or Kentucky, a really good team that loses in its conference tournament and then loses its opening round game, and thus misses the NCAAs entirely, but is still super awesome and talented and fun to watch.

Another very improtant benefit: this would create a huge incentive to win your conference tournament, for everyone. Right now, many teams are guaranteed a bid (and in some cases a high seed) regardless of how they do in their conference tournaments. As a result, teams sometimes arguably “mail it in” a bit. In this new system, on the other hand, winning your conference tournament eliminates a potentially difficult opening-round game, protects you from the potential of a dangerous round-of-64 showdown with a perhaps inferior but well-rested opponent (indeed it allows you to be the well-rested one, if such a matchup occurs), and means you only have to win 6 games, instead of 7, to be the national champion. So it would make all conference tournaments more compelling, across the board, because everyone is fighting for something concrete (instead of the current situation, where a lot of BCS conference teams are just “playing for seeding,” which is an awfully amorphous goal, since nobody knows for sure what their status-quo seed is, or what their if-they-win seed is).

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