It's time for madness

Villanova defeated Georgetown in 1985 in one of the most memorable finals. 

Always thought Duke could go winless and still receive a top seed in the Charlotte Regional of the NCAA basketball tournament.  

Sure, teams that belong to some of the powerhouse conferences certainly have a tough go of it when it comes to picking up wins. That’s why you see schools from the Big East, the ACC, Big-10, dot their early season schedule with games that they can get the win, also known as “buy-games” where a top program will actually pay a school from a smaller conference to come to their place and take the loss.  

Instead of meeting again the following year at the “small-school” gym, the payment buys out the home-and-home return trip.  Basically, Big Time program gets the win, and smaller school helps fills holes in the department budget, or maybe can finally buy a new set of uniforms.

And that is fine.  It’s the nature of the business and sometimes you see the major upsets, but rarely.

But to avoid getting off-track.

Remove names of schools when discussing selection for the tournament. I know it’s not as easy as it sounds. The committee takes a look at each team’s schedule in depth and probably would be pretty simple to figure it out.  Or would it?  Couldn’t you just assign each team a nickname (other than the school’s mascot).  Maybe a crayon color.  A monopoly piece?

A power conference certainly deserves to have more teams in the tournament, but does the 10th-place team in a so-called power league, really deserve to go?   Perhaps as it is hard to argue when your schedules for the months of January and February feature teams ranked in the top-25 on a weekly basis.

The beauty of the NCAA tournament is the opportunity for a team to prove it is a national champion by its performance on the court. The field has expanded considerably over the years, and I think the current field of 68 is just about right.  If you are not one of the 68 best (34 at-large selections), then probably you don’t deserve to be in the tournament.

But unlike FCS football (I-A) where a computer and coaches decide on a telephone call who will play in the national championship, the basketball tournament let’s the players decide who is the best.  The opportunity to see a David vs. Goliath and the underdog team make a run and challenge the top seeds to see which is a better team.

Villanova and Georgetown of 1985 was a classic case. Villanova was the No. 8 seed of the tournament but earned its way to the finals and pulled off the perfectly executed game to defeat the powerhouse and top-seeded Hoyas from Georgetown in the championship game. Others have followed. Butler, VCU, Gonzaga, Xavier have all been NCAA underdog darlings, coming so close but only to finishing just short of winning the national title.

The part of me that feels for the underdog is knowing how valuable strength of schedule is in selection for an at-large berth. As I mentioned above, the major conference members benefit from playing each other to bolster its strength of schedule and RPI. For many of those schools at the low to mid-major level of Division I, it is almost impossible to schedule teams from the “Big Six” power conferences to arrange an out-of-conference schedule to draw serious consideration.

Power schools are happy to schedule “winnable games” or “money games” to schools they know they can beat (though sometimes they don’t). But for a team from a mid-major level conference, and pretty darn good, they only chance they’ll get, if any, is to go on the road and forget about scheduling a return trip.

Long Beach State of the Big West has done a fine job scheduling the likes of North Carolina, Syracuse, Pittsburgh.  But what benefit would it give a team in the a major conference to schedule a game with the likes of Creighton, Akron, Butler, Ohio, Wichita State, Northern Iowa, Albany (hello Washington) where the chance of actually losing a game, is pretty high?

I could go on and on, but heck, just give me a bracket. I’m ready to go.