Stop Trying To Change The NCAA Tournament, It's A Dumb Idea

I hate that I have to write this blog, but I’m fired up that I feel the need to. It started with a piece by the Athletic that had the line a team must finish at least .500 in their conference in order to qualify for the NCAA Tournament. Naturally that debate took to Twitter for what seems to be the 5th year in a row at a minimum.

It’s incredibly stupid. That may be a compliment. That’s how dumb this idea is.

In a simple, one word answer, it’s impossible to come up with this idea because of, oh, I don’t know, unbalanced schedules. Why are we going to reward the Pac-12 and going 10-8 in there vs 8-10 in a much better ACC? Well, we aren’t. But in this hypothetical, why would we? That 10-8 Pac-12 team isn’t better than the 8-10 ACC team.

The goal of the NCAA Tournament is to determine a champion with 68 teams. Here’s the thing. 32 of them are auto bids. Every single goddamn conference in the country has an auto bid. It’s not like the ACC gets 2 and the A-Sun gets 1. Every team in the country has the same opportunity to make the NCAA Tournament.

After that the goal is to get the next best 36 teams into the NCAA Tournament. Can we stop pretending like Vermont would rather have the round robin chance against the Big 12 during the regular season? I bet Oklahoma would love to play in the America East Tournament and get the auto bid. It’s funny how we don’t talk about the other side of the ball when people clammer for mid-majors to have a high-major schedule.

Speaking of at-large bids. When we hear a ‘bid stolen’ you know who steals that bid? A mid-major. A team like Colorado State wins the MVC preventing Nevada from the auto bid. It’s not Wisconsin winning the Big 10 Tournament stealing a bid. Again, every conference has an auto bid, let’s stop forgetting that in this dumbass argument.

Also stop with the argument point ‘if Loyola didn’t win the MVC they wouldn’t have gotten in the NCAA Tournament and had a great story.’ Who gives a shit? Loyola didn’t deserve an at-large. They had 1 really good win at Florida in the nonconference. They also lost to a 196th ranked team in Milwaukee. Gotta talk about both sides of the ball here. Oh, also, there would have been a great story regardless.

This year we’ll likely see more mid-majors in the NCAA Tournament. Not because of some change, but because they are better this year. Wofford, Buffalo, Lipscomb, etc., they are all on the bubble or in the NCAA Tournament because they deserve to be there. That’s the goal of this thing. Stop trying to come up with some limit of who deserves in without realizing the incredible unbalanced schedules across the country PLUS the fact that there are auto bids for every team to get in.

There’s only one change allowed to the NCAA Tournament. Put Gus on loan for a month.