March Madness 4 - BCS Conferences vs. Mid Majors
Posted on Tue Mar 13, 2007 at 08:56:33 AM EST
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Every year when the March Madness brackets come out, the same brouhaha breaks out about Mid Majors vs. Big BCS Conferences.
This year it is Arkansas, Illinois, Purdue and Stanford standing in for the big conferences vs. Drexel, Appalachian State and a few others (interestingly Syracuse is complaining too this year, rather disingenuously imo - 10-6 in the Big East is not what it used to be because of unbalanced schedules).
The argument it seems to me is simple - by and large the 5th, 6th and 7th place teams in the big conferences will be better than the "deserving" mid major teams. The question is not that for me, it is whether the idea of having the tournament include lesser teams - the 14, 15 and 16 seeds are mostly from tiny conferences where the teams are almost certainly not worthy in conventional terms - extends to the 34 at large bids. But who has a beef here really? Let's think about it on the flip.
I think the 6th and 7th place teams from the Big conferences have ZERO beef. If you can't finish in the top half of your conference, then you really have no right to compete for the national championship. The tourney can choose to allow you to, but you really have no beef.
By the same token, if Drexel had finished higher in the CAA, it finished FOURTH (VCU and ODU are 11 and 12 seeds respectively from the CAA), it would have been in.
I think no one really has a beef. What you have is a discussion of what the makeup of the tourney should be. Personally, I don't think any team that does not finish in the top half of its conference should be invited. That's my one rule.
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