Don't you believe that it is grossly unfair when a team loses a bid to the NCAA tournament when a vastly inferior team did get such a bid?
We are seeing this again this year, with Penn headed to the Big Dance, while both Auburn and Wake Forest are sniffing a bicycle seat, as they said in an episode of Hill Street Blues.
The 18-11 Quakers are going to the NCAAs as "champions" of the Ivy League, while the Tigers and Demon Deacons, both 17-16, have both been relegated to the NIT (which the NCAA owns, by the way).
Clearly, the Ivy League is not a major conference — the way the SEC and the ACC are.
Something far worse happened in 1989, when St. John's was not in the NCAA tournament — but Robert Morris, as the "champions" of the Northeast Conference, was.
Had St. John's played Robert Morris 100 times on a neutral court that year, the Colonials would have clearly lost all 100 such games (Robert Morris was 21-9 in 1988-89 while St. John's went 20-13 playing a much tougher schedule).
Indeed, this ridiculous inequity helped put sports talk radio in general, and New York City's WFAN in particular, on the proverbial map.
But it is not too late to do something about this — and that is to divide college basketball into a "BBS" and a "BCS," patterned on the "FBS" and "FCS" that have always existed in college football — with each subdivision having its own playoff tournament (and the size of the latter being expanded from its current 32 teams).
Furthermore, to make things more equitable, runners-up in conference tournaments should be given priority over semifinalists, who in turn should be given priority over quarter-finalists, to discourage teams that finished 31-2 from "dogging it" in the conference tournament, figuring that they are going to not only get an NCAA bid, but also get a high seed regardless.
In any event, it is flat-out wrong to let a team into the NCAA tournament that simply does not have the talent to be there (and haven't you noticed that not a single team from any of the big conferences is seeded lower than 11th in their region? There must be some reason for that).
Simply place the Ivy Leagues of this world in the proposed BCS, and problem solved.
If President Trump wants to bolster his sagging approval ratings, he will seriously consider creating a federal Department of Sports, which will have the final say on matters like this.
He — or perhaps even she? — might prevent the seemingly imminent lockout in Major League Baseball, among other things.
Just so long as this department keeps its hands off mixed martial arts.
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