Hey guys, a new conference tournament format just dropped, and it sucks!
That conference would be the Horizon League, in the midwest. They start with a first round game contested by the bottom two teams in the conference. Fine. Normal.
Then there's a quarterfinal round of sorts. I say "of sorts" because only three of the winners from this round advance to the semifinals. How is the fourth semifinalist set? By making the two worst quarterfinal winners play for it.
That's right! They've invented a play-in game in the middle of the tournament rather than the beginning.
If you knock off the #1-seed in the quarterfinals, sorry, that's not enough to absolve your awful regular season. You must play an extra game before being allowed to advance to the round the 1-seed had they beaten you.
Defenses I've seen of this new format usually give some type of lip service to protecting the higher seeds and rewarding them for a better regular season.
Except, this doesn't do that. If you are the top seed and bounced in the quarterfinals, you're season is just as done as it would be if your opponent did get to go directly to the semis.
No, this doesn't protect or reward the good teams, it just punishes the bad ones.
And bad teams are punished enough, such as with a opening-round play-in games, which are fine. Or by being left out of the conference tournament entirely (more on that in a minute). Or by making them play the best teams right out of the gate, which this #1-vs #8 (or #1 vs. #16) format have done forever. Because that's a time-tested, great way to reward good teams and punish the bad ones.
The reason more teams aren't left out of their conference tournament is because money. So that's out. Still, while the conferences want whatever scraps of scrip the last-place team's fans will give them to get bounced as soon as they step into the tournament arena, they still want to reward the teams that were successful in the regular season.
So, how to do accomplish both? By coming up with ridiculous tournament formats like this one, or like the one introduced by the Sun Belt last year, which is just like the "stepladder" formats used for the finals of televised bowling tournaments.
Tournaments prior to the Big Dance, be they conference tournaments or early-season neutral-site tournaments, are always changing, and always for the worst, because the changes are always dictated by profit.
When I was a kid in the '80s an early '90s, the early season tournaments were done with optimal formats. You had (and still have) 8-team tournaments, like the Maui Classic. That's good, but those are endangered too; lots of big programs don't like them. Indeed, check out this years Maui field: Texas, North Carolina State, Washington State, Arizona State, Seton Hall, Boise State, USC, and Chaminade. Murderer's Row, this is not.
Besides tournaments like the Maui Classic, you had a whole slew of four-team tournaments hosted by one of the schools, usually the blue blood of the bunch. So you'd have, for example, Indiana vs. Bowling Green and Howard vs. Sacramento State in a four-team tournament. Obviously, Indiana would usually win the tournament with ease, but it would also create two games (don't forget about the third place game!) not featuring Indiana.
That's not model is not as profitable as could be, with more games featuring Indiana, so instead these tournaments exist in a new, weird, and less compelling format, where all the teams take on Indiana on consecutive nights, and there will either be one non-Indiana game, or none.
Then there's the preseason NIT. This used to be a whopping 16-team tournament! Then it was 8, and then they started experimenting with playing the early round games on campus sites rather than at Madison Square Garden.
Other tournaments followed the NIT changes to structure, including something called the 2K Sports College Hoops Classic, which also held the quarterfinals at campus sites and the semifinals and finals in New York City.
In said tournament, Gardner-Webb beat Kentucky at Rupp Arena. That meant that the tourney organizers got Gardner-Webb fan money in NYC rather than Kentucky fan money.
They quickly learned from that mistake, and decreed that the in the future, the semifinalists are pre-ordained to be the big schools they want to be in the semifinals.
Every other similar tournament followed suit, and this scourge of a format lives on to this day, and while there is still am on-campus round before the semifinals that is nominally part of the tournament, that round doesn't mean anything that just a regular ol' non-conference game wouldn't.
People talk about moneyed interests ruining college football, but I see its affects far more on college basketball.
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