A modest counterproposal: Win or go home

In his weekly Basketball Wednesday column at The IX, The Next’s parent newsletter, our Editor-in-Chief Howard Megdal argued that regular season conference tournament champions should receive an auto-bid to the NCAA tournament. He argues that teams which were already rewarded for their season-long efforts by having the easiest route through their conference tournaments, but fail to capitalize on this advantage, should receive a second reward in the form of an automatic qualifier.

I have a modest counterproposal: Don’t do that.

Don’t let in teams that lost just because they were good two or three months ago, unless they were already getting at-large consideration. Don’t let in teams that weren’t good enough to win when the deck was stacked in their favor just because they had won on more even playing fields — or courts — unless they were already getting at-large consideration. And don’t try to consider a three-month body of work in a competition based around simply winning six games in a row.

Case in point: Howard’s key example here is UTSA. The Roadrunners went 17-1 in the American regular season, then lost their first AAC tournament game to a Rice team that went under .500 in conference play. This is going to keep UTSA out of NCAAs, not because the committee is biased against the AAC, but because it lost to a Texas A&M team that shouldn’t get a WBIT invite and a Stanford team perilously on the bubble. Those were its only half-decent non-conference opponents; the Roadrunners left themselves with no breathing room before conference play and also lost to South Florida, the team that by all metrics besides regular season win-loss is the actual best team in the American.

Win one of those games and Karen Aston’s right on the bubble.

Howard’s other examples are James Madison, who at no point this season beat a team in at-large consideration, and UNLV, who went 1-2 against San Diego State and lost to both Arizona and Northwestern and are likely to receive at-large consideration anyway. The Dukes at least made up for being in a low-major conference by scheduling a tough non-conference schedule that includes three top-10 teams, but being on the losing end of the Big Sky’s best win didn’t help the cause. Of the three, only James Madison made it to its conference championship game.

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You know who understands that basketball is a game of winners and losers? The Ivy League. Those born-and-raised meritocrats understand the system and scheduled no more than two easy non-conference wins apiece, along with a few mid-tier or lower Power 4 teams and plenty of good mid-majors. They now stand a chance of being the first mid-major since the Big East in 2018 to send three teams to March Madness. If you consider the Big East a power conference even without UConn, the last time a mid-major conference that did not employ UConn sent three teams to the NCAA tournament was the A-10 in 2016 — a trio that did not include one of its co-regular champions.

Which raises a second issue: plenty of conferences have split regular season titles and have their tournament won by a team that didn’t share in the former. Leave out one of those split-title holders and you’re still excluding a conference champion. Then there are the financial losses inherent in having these teams replace Power 4 teams — losses which would far outweigh whatever gain in regular season attendance Howard posits would happen — and the huge drop in fan interest by having name brands replaced by small colleges, and so on.

These are all secondary reasons not to change the system. The real issue is that allowing regular season champions to automatically qualify runs against the entire point of March Madness. 

College basketball is not a sport designed to find its best team, it’s designed to crown a champion — and those are fundamentally different things. That’s the difference between the MLB regular season, 162 games that, with very strong certainty demonstrate which team is the best in the league, and the postseason, which advances the better team in slightly over half of all matchups.

You don’t watch college basketball for the purity of the product; you watch it to see a highly technical, specialized game that requires massive preparation for any matchup, played by people with undeveloped prefrontal cortexes who don’t get as much time to prepare as professionals, with millions of dollars thrown at schools to produce it — or because half your family or your best friends all went to the same school as you. Either way, the point of this incarnation of the sport is the improbability. We don’t need 44 games per team like the WNBA, or 82 like the NBA or 162 like MLB to sort out who all the best teams are and in what order, because that changes the fundamental nature of college basketball.

March Madness is designed to find the sweet spot between crowning the best teams and pure randomness. The committee tends to do a decent enough job at sorting the field that a half-dozen or more low-major teams with no signature wins over NCAA tournament teams don’t need to be replacing Cal or Nebraska. Diluting the at-large field with regular season champs that failed to bring home the conference tournament trophy makes the opening weekend even more of a wash than it already is (just two double-digit seeds have made the Sweet Sixteen in the past four years).

A reward already exists for having a great regular season: an easy path through the conference tournament. That conference tournament is the real showcase for March Madness, so win it. Or go home.

Correction: an earlier version of this article stated that James Madison did not make it to its conference championship game. That error has been corrected.

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