The NCAA Tourney II

Anything you say at this point is just hyperbole. After the first weekend people were already describing this tournament as the best ever and with the completion of week 2 you can see those sentiments being officially cemented into history. This is the greatest tournament I have seen in my lifetime. It's not just the upsets or the fact that a mid-major is playing in the final four in their hometown. It's that everyday of this tournament has had a game that was capable of taking your breath away. This weekend alone we saw Butler upset Syracuse, KSU win a double overtime thriller, OSU get upset, Kentucky fall and MSU reach it's second consecutive final four with a 1 point win.

Yet I woke up this morning thinking about college football and it's BCS championship system and I wondered what the BCS defenders thought of all this. We know that a team seeded 5th in the tourney will play for the championship. We almost had zero #1 seeds reach the final four and the #1 seed that did reach the final four was universally considered to be the weakest of the #1 seeds. When the tournament is over what will we be able to say about this year's national champion?

Of course, the BCS folks are quiet this time of year. People are excited about college basketball and they have no interest in hearing people blindly defended their ideas for a playoff. But if properly provoked, I imagine they would be beating their chest and pointing out that this year's college basketball champion won't be college basketball's best team and that only the BCS gives you a battle of their respective sports best teams.

That's right, the BCS would have you watch Kansas vs. Kentucky. Two of the sports elite programs and each team sporting several future NBA players including two players from Kentucky who will likely be drafted in the top five of this summers draft. The two teams finished the regular season with records of 32-2. They play in big conferences and won their conferences regular season and post season titles. It's a no brainier that these two teams should face off for their sports national titles.

But that's not going to happen. Kansas didn't even it make out of the first weekend losing to a directional school in the second round and Kentucky looked like a team lead by freshmen constantly turning the ball over and shooting below 50% on free throws in losing to West Virginia in the regional final.

This is one of things BCS people will point to in arguing against an 8 or 16 team tournament for college football. They believe it is better to take the two teams who stand out during the regular season and give them a pass to the championship. I will spare you the details of how I would like to see such a tournament formatted, but I would say that home games until the final would be an important aspect of my plan.

So the question becomes whether or not the greatest tournament of all time is providing us with a worthy champion. In answering that question I first want to air my grievances with college football's system as simply as I possibly can. That grievance would be that it determines it's champion through subjective means. Like figure skating, gymnastics or competitive cheer the eye test can be just as important as the actual performance. The final outcome in gymnastics is a combination of peoples opinions which may include a U.S. judge giving a U.S. performer a 9.9 while the Russian judge gives that same performer a 9.7. In college football a coaches poll voter from a Big Ten school may vote OSU number 1 while a coaches poll voter from the Big 12 may vote for Texas. Complicating matters further for the BCS are the teams like Auburn, Utah twice, and Boise State twice who have managed to go undefeated while winning BCS bowl games but where never deemed worthy enough to be given a chance at a national title.

Which brings me back to the greatest tournament ever. As I mentioned before we are guaranteed to have a team seeded #5 play for the national championship. When a team is given a #5 seed in the tournament it is because a panel of judges using a variety of measuring techniques have determined that these teams represent the 17-20th best teams in the tournament. So a BCS defender would look at that and say that even if you had your 16 team college football tournament teams in college football who preform similarly to Butler or MSU still wouldn't get a chance. They might even use that as an attack on the NCAA tourney by saying that you are not determining a real champion and they surely will throw in the fact that the tourney devalues the regular season.

I say it shows the true brilliance of the NCAA tournament. That brilliance lies in the fact that it recognizes people are in charge of seeding and determine the field of 65 are all human. As much as they may try to avoid it, subjective qualities such as the eye test still factor in, but they do not unfairly limit. When you look at the NCAA tournament and you see teams seeded fifth, you see teams for which a committee does not believe they will make the tournaments second weekend. But, because the tournament is actually played out, those teams still have a chance to prove those committee members wrong. And in Butler and MSU we may have the two best arguments in history for teams being unfairly seeded. In Butler you have a mid-major level school who went 28-4 on the season, beat Ohio State, Xavier, Northwestern and UCLA before going undefeated in their conference and bring a 20 game winning streak with them into the tournament and a #11 ranking in the final AP poll. In MSU you had a team that was steaming roll through the Big Ten before and injury to a star player sent them on a three game losing streak (two of those games were road games) and the team still managed to finish tied for first in conference play. Their final regular season ranking in the AP poll was #13 and their regular season record was 24-8.
I am not a hard-core basketball fan, but looking at this information it is easy to see that perhaps these teams are more deserving of the success they have had than their seeds would imply. And judging from the amount of buzz this year's tournament has created I would argue that deciding a champion is an objective manor certainly seems to draw in more casual fans than the BCS and it's subjective means of telling people we believe these are the only 2 teams that deserve to play for the championship. Of course, I am not alone in believing that the college basketball tournament is a better way of determining a national champion than the BCS. Even the NCAA would agree with me on that. After all, the NCAA does not and never has recognized a national championship that was not decided by a tournament format.