Why I hate these tournaments

By Lance McAlister

I love college basketball, but despise conference tournaments. Why? They are cash-grabbing attempts to artificially inflate the excitement of college basketball and ultimately cheapen and devalue the regular season. The concept is completely backwards.

Conference tournaments place value and emphasis on three days of tournament play over three months of conference play. Teams fight through nonconference play, exams, conference play, road trips, hours of practice and injuries. Their ultimate goal is to be one of the 68 teams rewarded with an NCAA Tournament appearance. Yet, conferences award their precious, automatic bids to the team that gets hot over a 3-4 day period.

Fans of the traditional, multiple-bid leagues may not give this concept a second thought. The Big 12 will likely have seven bids this year, the Pac-12 and Big Ten could land six bids, while the ACC has five bids. But what about a one-bid league such as the Sun Belt, Horizon or Southland? Explain the logic of a regular season champ that suffers a conference tournament hiccup, resulting in having to settle for an NIT bid.

Let's be clear — conferences have the choice to award their automatic bid to the regular season champ or the conference tournament champ. If I were a conference commissioner, I’d want that to be the team that best represents the conference and offers the best chance to win in the NCAA Tournament. Wouldn’t you?

As for the dollars and common sense of conference tournaments, look around at the half empty arenas at some of these events. Now, tell me how much interest they are creating. There is a redundancy aspect of conference tournaments. I grow weary of watching teams play each other a third time in a season. Been there, done that, and over it.

Not to sound like the old man screaming to get kids off his lawn, but do you remember how it used to be? Years ago, ONLY the regular season champ earned an NCAA bid. The Missouri Valley Conference battle of the 1961-62 season is a classic case of value being placed on conference play. The Cincinnati Bearcats were 28-2, ranked second in the country, and the Bradley Braves were ranked 4th. The two teams tied for the regular season title, and had to meet on a neutral court to decide the regular season champ. The Bearcats were the defending national champs and had to win the tiebreaker game just to make the NCAA Tournament! The Bearcats won the game and went on to win back-to-back NCAA championships. The Braves lost, and were relegated to the NIT!

Yes, there will be conference tournament madness and buzzer beaters this year. Cinderella will slip on the shoe and dance to the tournament. The TV camera will focus on the players celebrating on the court with their coach. But what about the team walking off the court, realizing their season-long body of work has been reduced to 40 minutes, and they are done?

Stony Brook won the American East by three games last year, finishing 25-8 overall and 14-2 in conference. They lost in the conference tournament and wound up in the NIT. Why in the heck should a fan even pay attention to what happens during January and February?

Liberty finished 15-20 overall, and 6-10 in the Big South last year. The Flames finished fifth out of six teams in their own division. But, they won four games in the conference tournament and grabbed the automatic bid. Meanwhile, top seed Charleston Southern packed up its 19-13 record, 12-4 in the Big South, and headed to the NIT.  Nothing says March Madness like a team with a losing record crashing the NCAA Tournament.

Give me the Ivy League way; a league smart enough to reward three months of work over three days.

A Butler graduate still lamenting the Horizon League quarterfinal loss of the Bulldogs’ great 2002 team, Lance McAlister hosts a popular daily sports talk program on WLW and WCKY radio in Cincinnati.

No such thing as too much hoops

By Mike DeCourcy

There is so very little in life in which one may eagerly overinduldge without suffering any unpleasant aftereffects. Too many cupcakes? There’s an extra 10 pounds you don’t want. Too much wine? Wake up with a headache the next morning. Too much beach time? A sunburn, or worse. Too much college basketball and …              

And what?              

Too much college basketball only leads a person to the realization there is no such thing as too much college basketball. This theory has been unscientifically tested, by me, using conference tournament week as the ultimate testing lab.

With a decent sports cable package, a comfortable couch and a functional remote, I sat and watched all or parts of 30 games in a single day, the Friday of conference tournament week in 2008. I persevered without the comforts of HD, wifi or an iPad. It wasn’t too much basketball. I could have gone for another 30 as soon as the last game ended.

You can repeat that odyssey this week, with all the modern technological upgrades, and you need not wind up with an extra chin at the end (unless you’re eating cupcakes all the while).

This is why it is so illogical to criticize conference tournaments. If we have conference tournaments, we have more basketball. We have lots more basketball. It’s a festival of bubbles popping, balls bouncing, seeds climbing, committee members huddling and miracles happening.

Evan Turner’s heave to beat Michigan at the buzzer in 2010? That was in the Big Ten Tournament, as was Blake Hoffarber’s miracle shot to beat Indiana two years earlier. Georgia beating Arkansas in a near-empty gym because of the tornado that damaged the Georgia Dome? SEC Tournament, 2008. The six-overtime Connecticut-Syracuse classic? Big East Tournament 2009.

And if we want to go really old-school — like, back to when I was in junior high — we can add in the classic N.C. State-Maryland ACC championship game in 1974, which was widely considered the greatest college basketball game ever played until Christian Laettner and Kentucky’s “Unforgettables” came along. The great John Feinstein tells a story about that night, when toward the end a couple of Pack players and a Terp or two got involved in a little skirmish that might have escalated. Hall of Fame referee Hank Nichols stepped between them and declared, "Not in this game."

There are those of us who believe that as wonderful as the first two days of the NCAA Tournament are, and they truly are fantastic, conference tournament week is even better. More participants. More games. More thrills. More basketball.

I understand that occasionally, perhaps even frequently, teams that are more accomplished in the regular season wind up missing the reward of the NCAA Tournament because they are upset in the conference tournament. But nobody forces those rules upon them. Their programs could have voted for a smaller tournament — say, only the top four teams, or just a championship game between the two best that ESPN could televise. Or they could do as the Ivy League and award the automatic NCAA bid to the regular-season champ. It’s a choice.

Everybody wants in on the fun, though, even many of the Ivy League coaches. They have been heard to grumble about the league’s need to get in step with the rest of the college game.

There’s something wonderful about the Ivy’s Friday/Saturday round-robin schedule, in which everybody plays everybody and missed class time is kept to a minimum. But it also seems a shame they miss out on the excitement everybody else is enjoying.

The Ivy League coaches who supported the failed bid to have the league start a conference tournament are like so many others who love and live the game: They want more basketball. Who could argue with that?