(03-28-2021 07:41 PM)ken d Wrote:  Yes, preferential treatment - when they get in the tournament ahead of literally dozens of more qualified teams, including many who aren't in a P6 conference. You can argue that a team that has a NET or RPI rank of 250 is underrated because they should really be #180. You can't argue that such a team belongs in the tournament just because they play in a conference that wouldn't even be competitive in D-II.

The conferences that are getting the short end of the stick at their expense are the true mid-majors - the five or six conferences that can on a given night give a P6 at large team a run for their money. Those are the conferences that actually have, on occasion, one of those great teams you mention. Those bottom 16-20 conferences rarely produce a single great team that deserves a high seed.

I think there's a common misconception about what the NCAA tournament actually IS.

And I think the NCAA itself has lost it's way on this subject. They used to have a guy who was in charge of telling the NCAA Selection committee HOW to do their job: The principles they WANTED the field to uphold: We made a metric to tell us what Win Pct vs SOS translates to.

Well, the ADs of the cartel didn't like those principles, had that guy ousted, and because they gave themselves the power to have 50% membership on every committee, they just decided to make their own rules about what the NCAA Tournament field SHOULD BE. (aka, all BCS teams).

And of course, non-BCS at-large bids have plummeted drastically, and you start seeing the Oklahoma AD screw over St. Bonaventure in 2016 when they're #29 in the metric by saying "Well, their metric number was good, but they didn't have a good OOC SOS" when OOC SOS is part of the metric. That's when you started to see the "moving target" for who gets a bid. While Michigan got one of the last at-larges despite being 2-10 vs NCAA teams.


The idea that the NCAA Tournament is SUPPOSED to be the 68 BEST TEAMS is just straight up wrong. It's not. The purpose of the NCAA Tournament is to determine a champion of all the conference champions AND some other non-champions who've proven they're capable of competing for a national title.

And when BCS teams finish NINTH in their conference by playing 14 games against NCAA Tournament teams and going 4-10, don't we have a sample size big enough to show that they can't compete for a championship?

On the other hand, do we actually know HOW GOOD Loyola and Drake are, when they really have only played pretty much each other three times?

And that's why it's absolute garbage to take Michigan State and Syracuse over teams like Saint Louis and Western Kentucky.


The thing I DO totally agree with is that conference tournaments to determine a champion are a massive disservice to non-cartel members.

Winthrop would have been left out of the NCAA Tournament at 26-2 if they lost their conference tournament. Just send your regular season champion. Chances are you aren't making money from your conference tournament anyway.

BUT... the reason they do it: to play their title game on ESPN during Championship Week.