Interesting idea from Kentucky's Calipari. Also a good point he makes about how it doesn't always help/hurt seeding. Why play 3/4 games and risk injury if you might not gain anything from it?
http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/15885267/kentucky-...
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Yes, let's crown a conference champion before the season even had a chance to begin... sounds great!
The conference champion would be the team that actually is the best in the conference over the course of a whole season and not just a team that plays well over 3 days. What a concept.
/insert dismissive GIF
You know, except for part where tournament champions get auto bids making the regular season standings essentially worthless...
But sure, setting the field for March Madness in November sounds perfect.
"Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari wants to move the SEC tournament to November and make it a preseason event, eliminating the automatic bid to the NCAA tournament and instead giving the bid to the regular-season champion."
Oh, so sayonara Cinderella teams, which just so happen to be the best part of tournament season...
What? You'll still have the no-name teams from crappy conferences that win the conference and get into the tourney.
Reg season champ gets the invite. If tied at end of season, a one game playoff. Win and you're in!
Conference tournaments are an essential part of March Madness, in my opinion. Also, the conference tournament offers a a win-or-go-home scenario with extremely big stakes. Teams care a lot about winning their conference tournament, and if you have the two best teams in the conference playing for the highest stakes, it almost always makes for an awesome game. The chances of these times meeting in the NCAA Tournament aren't nearly as high and the regular season would not be as big of a deal, unless they meet in a game that almost certainly will decide who will be regular season champion. Making the conference tournament before the season will definitely make it lose its importance.
conf tourneys are only worth money because the NCAA birth is on the line. also, when conferences played home and home round robin, this wouldn't be a terrible idea, but in an era of 12-15 team leagues with unbalanced schedules, the regular season champ isn't necessarily the best team, either.
maybe a better idea would be to expand the tournament (hear me out). 32 conf tournament champs placed into round of 64 on Thurs-Fri. expand 36 at-larges to 64 and include all reg season conf champs who didn't win their tournament.
even though the 32 conf champs get a bye, they don't have to be the 1-8 seeds in the bracket. you could still have 4 brackets seeded 1-24 (instead of 16) and build it out for each region appropriately. you could have a 1 seed in the 1st round playing a 20 seed and a 24 seed waiting to play the winner, etc. basically seed the teams, then build the bracket, similar to how its done today with a little added complexity.
eliminate Dayton as the permanent 1st round location and just play the 1st round on Tue and Wed in the same locations hosting Thurs-Sat and Fri-Sun respectively.
so you go from 68 with 4 confusing play in games no one watches to 96 with 32 awesome 1st round games followed by 32 equally awesome 2nd round games. Tue and Wed would have tons of top seeded name teams and actually feel like part of the tournament and all 32 conferences are guaranteed to be represented on Thurs-Fri games in the traditional round of 64. what's not to love (unless you're anti-expansion for the sake of being anti-expansion)?
How many conferences are there? (serious question)
Edit: 32, apparently. Who knew?
uhhh, i knew. it was in my OP you responded to.
I'm in the "it's too big" camp. Just leave it at 64 (or 68) and give auto-bids to both reg. season and tourney winners. This makes the regular season important again, and a good "one-bid" team doesn't get left out because of a lucky buzzer beater in the conf. championship. Give the extra spots where season & tourney champ are the same to at-larges. The reg. season champs get a lower seed so they're still encouraged to participate in the tourney.
No more 8-bid conferences, and the "you should have won your tourney" line would now apply to all teams, not just the little guy.
in your scenario, conferences may encourage teams to throw their conf tourney in order to get a 2nd bid (or teams who are already in will rest players, etc). while that may be a cynical view, i think my 96 team version where the conf tourney champs (and only the conf tourney champs) get a bye into the round of 64 would ensure no one take the conf tourneys for granted. one less game and 2-3 extra days of rest is too big a prize to ignore, even if you have already punched your ticket via the regular season.
This may be the most comprehensive presentation of a reasonable approach to expanding the NCAA brackets that I've seen. It would be interesting to see a visual mock-up of this approach using last years field (plus the missing regular season conference champs). Definitely more well thought out than the "just go to 128" crowd that bubbles up now and again. Have a leg.
Compromise:
Leave the tournament at the end of the year, but make it a 'standard' bracket. I hate how there's 5 or 6 rounds of the ACC tournament, but only 15 teams. I get the point - more games = more revenue, but I still find it infuriating. Just make it 4 rounds with the Number 1 seed getting a first round bye.
sounds like a dumb concept. Leave it how it is. Tournament gives any team that last chance to make the NCAA tourney, which keeps all fans tuned in til the end.
Sorry John, but just because the tourney didn't help your seeding doesn't mean the tourneys had other implications for other conferences.
If you don't find value in your team playing in the tournament, then forfeit and hope the committee doesn't kick you out of the big dance.
You have to keep the conference tourneys because they give a team a chance that was late to jell as a team. Take VT for example next year. They start the season slow to learn how to play as a team and then get hot and are the team to beat. Some teams are just slow starters and this would destroy a team and it's fans hope for a tournament bid. Besides Callapari is just a whiner, with the best recruiting class every year. Just imagine how good those recruits would be if they had a real coach.
I've always wondered why the top teams don't tank their first game of a conference tournament. They have zero to gain and risk injury.
For a second I thought this was football, which would have been an interesting idea.
No matter what I read up here, I always assume it's football at first...