Double Buh-Bye

I'm irritated.

Those of you who know me are probably saying "Go Figure...what's new?"  And you're probably right.

When it comes to sports, I get quickly irritated by things I don't understand.  It might be my old age (40 might be the new 30 but there are days where it feels like the new 65).  It might be a perpetual lack of sleep as I desperately try to mix in adult beverages on the weekends in the midst of a 2 1/2 year old and a 7-month old who think the day starts at 4am (and 5am and 6am and...).  It might be my perfectionist attitude (at which point I can hear pool participants bellow "Perfectionist?  You still run the pool manually!!).  I'm even willing to admit that it might be my neverending quest to be crabby.

What's even worse is that when I start to understand what I previously didn't understand, it's a good bet that money is involved somehow.  That's what makes this particular irritation that much more baffling.

When all hell broke loose in 2005 and 23 "football" teams changed conferences, the chaos wrought what can only be referred to as The (Super) Big East.  On the basketball side of college sports, TSBE became a 16-team poster child for my favorite college basketball fallacy (and it works for football too), the Strength of Schedule argument for putting average teams into March Madness.

In a nutshell, the SOS fallacy is part upset, part cannibalism.  A couple teams upset power schools outside the conference early in the season when everyone loses at least once or twice in holiday tournaments (anyone remember Chaminade?) thus increasing their RPI.  Once the conference season starts, teams in the conference start to feed off one another, getting various key wins (usually at home) against the supposed conference leaders and all of a sudden, everyone's RPI is too high to ignore come tourney time.  TSBE has been using this to perfection this year and is now poised to put 8, maybe 9 teams in this year's tournament.

But that's a different irritation.

I have already said that the conference tournaments are an unnecessary waste of time (see previous blog entry).  Especially with the mid-majors, one ill-timed upset can invalidate an entire season and cost a very good team a spot in the Big Dance--especially when conferences like TSBE are using the SOS fallacy to pull spots away from the bubble.  In the case of TSBE, there is one aspect of their conference tournament that is more idiotic than any other in the history of college basketball (with apologies to Duquesne coach Ron Everhart who suggested they should "double the size of the [March Madness] field to 130 teams).

It's the horror of the "double bye."

What is it exactly?  The top four seeds in TSBE conference tournament are given TWO byes.  What's that you say?  You thought there were 16 teams in TSBE which you thought was a nice round number for a tournament of any kind with NO byes?  So did I.

But not TSBE.  Once they expanded the tournament from 12 to 16 teams last year, they needed to come with a creative way to continue the bye for the top four teams (because a bye works in a 12-team format but not if you let everyone in it--after all, it's not like this is a 96-team tournament for Christ's sake).  Plus, God forbid (I know two religious references in one paragraph) our top four teams would have to play more than three games before the NCAA tournament.  (It's not like it was their idea to become TSBE--with great power comes great responsibility).

So instead, seeds 9-16 (you know, the team's that should consider themselves lucky that the conference even let them in the tournament) would have to win five games to win the title and qualify for the NCAA tournament.  What's worse, seeds 5-8, the teams that are usually still pretty good (even with the SOS fallacy) are forced to win one more game than the top four teams--and most times in TSBE there isn't a lot of difference between 1 and 8.

Disagree?  Then you must have missed the part today where three of the top four seeds lost in their first game (the THIRD round of the tournament) and in the fourth case, West Virginia, they needed a three-point bank shot at the buzzer to beat Cincinnati and were only afforded that chance when a Bearcat dribbled off his foot trying to set up their buzzer beater.

What is so wrong with eliminating all the byes?  The bottom line is that the top four teams would still have an advantage because they would get a warm up game (this year, seeds 13-16 were 17-15, 15-17, 12-19 and 8-23, respectively) and they could even have all four teams play the first day of the tournament so they would have a day off before playing the quarters.  And the argument about a grueling tournament is ridiculous because three of the top four seeds were one and out this year.  Maybe it was their way of artificially extending their break time while assisting fellow TBSE members "off" the bubble (another iteration of the SOS fallacy).

And if you really want to be creative, go old school (assuming the NIT is "old school" this time next year) by having the top eight teams play the first round game at home, say on Tuesday.  The survivors arrive at Madison Square Garden Friday for the quarterfinals.  This gives them two days rest to travel and prep for a possible grueling three-game stretch (I mean, how can we expect college age kids to play back-to-back games?  They need to be coddled.  They need their rest.  They need---actually, they need to remember it's a game and enjoy the damn thing).

I'm really surprised such a concept has seen the light of day because there is nothing innovative or rational about it.  It is just another example of making something more complex to provide an entitlement without actually trying to come up with a sensible, workable solution.  And now that five of the past eight double bye teams in the past two years have lost their first game, including Syracuse who at one time was ranked #1 and a sure bet to be a #1 seed (no longer after consecutive losses to Louisville and Cincinnati), they will rethink it.

Maybe after all this chaos, the coaches and AD's from TBSE will put their heads together in the off-season and come up with a ground-breaking, landmark solution that works for everyone.  How about only admitting the 5-8 seeds since the 1-4 seeds in the TBSE are already a shoo-in for the NCAA tournament?

Ladies and gentlemen...the four-team conference tournament!

Peace,
Reg