It's March at last, which means the weather gets warmer, the snow (hopefully) subsides for the year and of course, March Madness takes over the sporting limelight for the latter half of the month. If you follow the tournament, you understand that with the coming of March Madness every year also comes the obligatory conversation about which teams the selection committee snubbed by leaving out of the competition field.
Sometimes, the numbers tell an odd story. 68 teams in total earn a bid to participate in the NCAA Tournament. Of those 68, 32 earn an automatic bid by winning their respective conference's tournament at the end of the regular season. The Ivy League doesn't hold a conference tournament and instead rewards their automatic bid to the regular season champion, but we'll get to that later. The remaining 36 teams earn at-large bids. So essentially, each of the 32 D1 conferences sends one representative, then the tournament selection committee awards at-large bids to the 36 best teams remaining that haven't already qualified.
Recommended for you
Sure, the process isn't at all what one would consider to be an exact science. The selection committee is comprised of people who are only human. They, like every person on this planet, are imperfect in nature and very much susceptible to human error. Because of this, there are inevitably a few "bubble" teams (teams on the cusp of earning an at-large bid) that end up with hurt feelings after the annual bracket reveal. Unfortunately for "bubble" teams biting their nails on Selection Sunday, all they can do is sit and wait. These selections are purely judgment calls, and if you want to play with the best, you have to prove that you are unconditionally and unequivocally one of the best. If you don't win your conference tournament and you don't have a distinguishable resume, the committee controls your gloomy destiny.
What the committee can't control are the automatic bids, and this is precisely the problem.
Over the last few years, D1 college basketball has seen a decrease in the gap between Power Five teams (teams from one of the major conferences, typically seeded higher) and Mid-Major teams (teams from lower-level conferences, typically seeded lower). In recent memory, there have been a handful of 15-over-2 upsets, and one of those (Florida Gulf Coast) even made the Sweet 16 in 2013. That same year, Wichita State, a nine seed, made the Final Four. The world saw VCU make the Final Four in 2011 as an 11 seed. Of course, nobody can forget perhaps the most incredible run in NCAA tournament history in 2006 when the George Mason Colonels, an 11 seed, made it all the way to the Final Four in truly improbable, Cinderella fashion.
Overall, the level of competition has increased. Long gone are the days where a team from a power conference can regularly show up and sleepwalk to a 20 plus point victory against a Mid-Major team. This spike in competition, I would argue, translates to league play and makes certain conferences more competitive from top to bottom as well, leading to some abnormalities when it comes to handing out automatic bids come tournament time.
If that sounds a little confusing, consider this. Unless you play in the Ivy League, there are no restrictions on the automatic bid from your conference. It doesn't matter where you finished in the conference standings at the end of the regular season, you can still punch your ticket to the dance if you win the tournament. Granted, regular season standings determine seeding for the conference tournament, but the idea remains that nobody is eliminated from qualifying. If you think about it, that really doesn't make sense.
The NCAA Tournament, at least on paper, is a bracket-style competition between the 68 best teams in D1 basketball to determine the National Champion for the season. With that in mind, I can't help but question the authenticity of the automatic bid. How fair is it that a team who doesn't at all possess the body of work required to qualify for the NCAA Tournament, and has struggled to win all year, can catch fire for a few straight days during conference tournament play and still qualify? Of course, this isn't the norm by any stretch, but it still happens nonetheless. Typically in non-power conferences where there isn't as much top-end talent concentrated in the higher seeds.
The product of this system is the legality of a team with, say, a sub .500 record qualifying for the NCAA Tournament just because they buckled down, figured things out and pulled a few upsets in their conference tournament. This year, unfortunately, my school, Lehigh, was on the business end of this head-scratching loophole. As the two seed in the Patriot League Tournament, our team battled its way to the championship game where we met with an unexpected nine seed in Holy Cross, who was statistically the second worst team in the league at the conclusion of the regular season (I won't throw you under the bus here, Lafayette). Holy Cross, to be fair, was on a tear, having upset Bucknell and Army, the one and four seeds, respectively, to reach the championship game.
While defeating Lehigh in the championship won them the Patriot League Tournament title, the victory brought their record on the season to a mere 14 wins and 19 losses. Holy Cross won five league games all year, but when it counted, they won the four straight that they needed to win in order to extend their season – and that's fair game. When you consider that in the landscape of an entire season of college basketball, it really doesn't make much sense to award poor regular season play with an NCAA Tournament berth just because the system of automatic bids abides strictly by the "what have you done for me lately?" policy.
In the grand scheme of things, this pitfall may not make much of a difference, as the teams whose only option at qualifying is to win their conference tournament likely aren't in serious contention to win the whole thing anyway. For the purposes of the integrity of the tournament, this issue needs addressed. Is a sub .500 team that won their conference tournament really one of the 68 best teams in all of D1 Men's Basketball? In my estimation, they are not. It's normally the selection committee's job to determine that, but because the team has already won the conference tournament, the committee has no say – they must automatically check yes.
I respect the NCAA's inclusion efforts to ensure that at least one representative from every conference in the country qualifies for the tournament, but this principle can be upheld without a conference tournament. If you need convincing, just take a look at the Ivy League, who awards their automatic bid to the league's top team at the end of the regular season. If you've been the best team in the league all season, it only makes sense that you earn the automatic bid awarded to the best team in the conference, regardless of who catches who napping in a four day stretch at the beginning of March. Unfortunately, the Ivy League will start holding its own conference tournament in 2017, but perhaps their current layout would provide an efficient solution to a problem that persists in the formation of the field of teams qualifying for the NCAA Tournament. The tournament by definition should be getting the best teams. Under the current methodology, I'm not so sure that's what's actually happening.
Maybe this is just another good example of why the Ivy League is smarter than everybody else. Then again, not everybody can make it. So, no matter what, there will always be hurt feelings come the Ides of March.
