You people get paid for this?

With all of the furor amongst college basketball analysts about the supposed overabundance of mid-major teams receiving at-large berths in this year’s NCAA Tournament, I feel compelled to address the situation. The truth is, we’ve been trending towards this for years now. The NCAA Tournament has become one of the truly elite sporting events in America, along with the Super Bowl and World Series. This rise in popularity has resulted in greater scrutiny towards both the tournament itself as well as its participants.

Starting a few years back, both fans and analysts (well, some of them) began directing some of their attention towards mid-major conferences throughout the year instead of only during Conference Championship Week. As the tournament’s profile has continued to grow, many fans & analysts became keenly interested in the schools and conferences who so often wreak havoc on our collective brackets by ousting the entrants from the larger, tradition rich, power conferences. What fans & analysts soon discovered (upon closer inspection) is that these smaller conferences often have more than one team capable of winning in the NCAA Tournament and that the best of these conferences often merit more than the traditional one (automatic) bid. This shift in thinking can be seen in the formulation of events like ESPN’s Bracket Buster Weekend as well as the increased coverage of mid-major conference tournaments (did you ever think you’d see the MVC Final on national television?). In fact, the mid-major conferences have become so accepted as legitimate forces that most “tournament experts” had been predicting results similar to the ones we saw on Selection Sunday for months now. Despite this, many of the analysts who are most closely aligned with college basketball’s power structure (Nantz, Packer, Phelps, etc.) chose to bury their head in the sand and ignore the continued success of mid-major conferences, both in the regular season as well as the NCAA Tournament. It was these same “experts” who reacted with incredulity when the seedings were announced on Sunday evening. These results were not a shock. In fact, one could make the case that two more mid-majors (Hofstra, Missouri State) deserved entry in the Tournament at the expense of schools like Texas A&M, Air Force or UAB.

What I find most vexing is the assertion amongst these analysts that the mid-major conferences are wholly undeserving of their total number of bids, despite the fact that none of these “experts” have seen a single minute of these mid-major teams in action all year long. The tournament selection process should be based on nothing more than the individual merits of specific teams in a given year, not on tournament history or five year trends. Finally, here are a couple of quick facts that should help to dispel the line of reasoning used by both Nantz and Packer during their verbal flogging of Craig Littlepage during Sunday’s telecast:

- Packer’s main line of logic regarding the MVC being undeserving of four teams in the Tournament was based on the ACC receiving the equal number of seeds. Packer concluded that none of these teams would be able to compete with the rest of the teams within the ACC. While this may be true, the tournament selection process is not about selecting teams based on how their conference’s number of bids corresponds with that of other conferences. Rather, the selection process is based upon the individual merits and overall strength of individual teams. ESPN’s Bracketologist (I’d like to see his degree by the way) Joe Lunardi best illustrated this point late last week when he pointed out that the Horizon League received three bids a few years ago during a year in which the ACC also received three bids. As Lunardi said (I’m paraphrasing), “Nobody would ever say that the Horizon league is as good as the ACC then, now, or forever. What we are saying is that the top three teams in that league (that year) were better then the 4th, 5th, and 6th place teams in the ACC that year.” The same logic applies to the MVC/ACC debate this year.
- Packer (amongst others) made a point to talk about the records of each conference in the tournament over the past five years as a means to support his assertion that conferences like the MVC and CAA were undeserving of their number of bids. To that I say this: It’s been 18 years since the Big 12 won a National Title. Does that mean that we shouldn’t ever give more than 3 or 4 bids to the Big 12? I didn’t think so.

Finally, for what it’s worth, I would’ve taken Cincinnati over Seton Hall.