I love the Final Four (just not these final four).
Pardon the interruption to my spring blog respite, but I felt the need to address an issue that I never imagined would merit a column – the disturbing idea that college football’s widely disparaged BCS System might have actually worked better in 2010 than our beloved NCAA Basketball Championship Tournament.
Blasphemy, right?
Let me start with an admission. I’m a huge fan of March Madness. HUGE.
I adamantly believe the Thursday and Friday of the first weekend of the tournament should be declared national holidays. It was not a coincidence that my wife and I decided to get married in Vegas during that weekend last year.
And the 2010 tourney has been full of buzzer beaters, upsets and heroic individual efforts – everything we love about this time of year.
But here we are, less than a week away from crowning this year’s national champions. Have you noticed who’s left? Michigan State, Butler, West Virginia and Duke.
Do you know how many combined weeks these four teams spent as the #1 ranked team in the country this year?
Try zero. At no point during the regular season did the nation’s sportswriters or coaches feel that any of the remaining teams were the best in the land. You know why? Because they weren’t.
Let’s discuss them one by one.
Duke
If I’m being generous, I could say Duke was among the four best teams throughout the year – probably at the tail-end of a group including Kentucky, Syracuse, and Kansas. They were a number one seed in the NCAA Tournament, afterall. But it sort of bothers me that they weren’t even the #1 seed in the ACC tournament. That was Maryland.
The highest ranked team that Duke beat this year was #13 Connecticut. Yes, the same UConn squad that finished the year at 18-16, losing to Virginia Tech in the NIT (as in Not In the Tournament). The most impressive aspect of this team may be its ability to play five white guys at the same time.
Coach K’s crew lost by 14 to NC State, a team that finished its ACC season at a less than impressive 5-11.
Who have they beaten in the tournament to make it to the Final Four? Arkansas-Pine Bluff (nuff said), California (the champion of a league that had no teams in the Top 25), Purdue (without their best player who was lost for the season), and Baylor (who finished in a three-way tie for second place in the Big 12).
West Virginia
The Mountaineers are also a very good team. But they finished the regular season in a three-way tie for second place in the Big East.
And their record during the regular season against ranked opponents? A pedestrian 5-4, with their only road win coming in overtime at Villanova, a team that was in the middle of a late season tailspin that saw them lose six out of their last nine games.
But, but, but…they beat Kentucky right? Yes, they did. They beat Kentucky on a night when the Wildcats missed their first 20 three point shots. The same night that West Virginia hit eight shots in the first half – all three pointers. I’ll get back to this one-game scenario in a moment, but let’s keep going.
Michigan State
In the Spartans’ last 10 games leading up to the NCAA tournament, they went 5-5. The highest ranked opponent they beat this season was Purdue…right after Robbie Hummel was lost for the season. Other than that? They beat #16 Wisconsin. That’s it.
After showing three forms of ID, Butler coach Brad Stevens was finally allowed to sit a the big boy table with the other coaches.
They went 2-5 in the regular season against ranked teams. And their losses included North Carolina, Florida, Texas and Illinois. And yes, I’m including a loss to Texas as a blemish on their record.
That they have come this far in the tournament is a testament to their coach. No wonder Phil Knight is offering half of Oregon and an Air Izzo shoe line to lure him away from MSU. But is this really the best team in the country?
Butler
I love Butler. They are the Boise State of college basketball. They play in the gym where Hoosiers was filmed. Their coach is younger than me and probably gets carded more than his players.
They even beat Ohio State in the regular season! Even if OSU was without Evan Turner, likely the #1 or 2 pick in the NBA Draft.
Unfortunately, they played only three other ranked teams during the season and lost all three. They were 8-4 in non-conference play, and then spent the remainder of the year beating up on powerhouses like Youngstown State, Loyola, Green Bay (not the Packers), and Detroit (not the Pistons) in the Horizon League. Not exactly the Big East.
They beat Syracuse and Kansas State this weekend to reach the Final Four, the top two seeds in their region. That’s definitely impressive. But anyone who watched Syracuse at all this year could see that the Orange played as poorly as they are capable of playing – including a mind-numbing 18 turnovers. And Kansas State had no legs left after surviving a double overtime classic two days before.
Look, every system for determining a champion has its issues. The BCS formula is more confusing than the final season of Lost. But it seems this year in particular, the flaws in the tournament system have been exposed for men’s basketball.
Here are some of the problems as I see them:
- The regular season is diminished, if not negated. Every team, no matter what level of success they achieved throughout the season, is placed on relatively even playing terms for the tournament. I say relatively because higher seeds are given an “easier” path through the first weekend because of seeding. But these games are played on neutral courts. There is no crowd advantage most of the time, and when there is, it’s just as likely to benefit the lower seed (See Baylor in Houston).
- When it’s one-and-done, weird things can happen. To win the championship, a team has to win six straight games. A lot can go wrong under that scenario. Your team might miss its first 20 three point shots. You might play a game less than 48 hours after going to double overtime. You have a very brief amount of time to prepare for your second match-up of the weekend, when you are likely facing unfamiliar teams and styles. I got news for you — Northern Iowa is not better than Kansas. Like I said, it can be a crap shoot.
- Host sites can be less than ideal playing environments. Imagine, for the sake of increased crowd capacity, if the national semi-final of a college football playoff was played on a temporary field set up at Texas Motor Speedway – a venue that at no other time of the year serves as a football stadium. That would be weird, right? Well, that’s not much different than putting a basketball court in the middle of the cavernous Reliant Stadium in Houston or Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis for the Final Four. Anyone who’s played in one of these stadiums will tell you that it changes the feel of the court and the game.
There's plenty of room on the infield. Set up some temporary bleachers on the track. This could work, right?
This is where professional sports have a huge advantage over college. The NFL has a one-and-done playoff system, but the best regular season teams are awarded byes and home field advantage. The NBA, NHL, and MLB have playoff series.
Even college baseball has the higher seeds hosting regional and super regional series. And the College World Series final is best out of three.
I’m not offering up a new solution here or suggesting they change the current format, but I do find it a bit ironic that with all the griping that takes place every year about how “unfair” the BCS is, it gave us an Alabama-Texas match-up – the undefeated champions of maybe the best two conferences in the country.
I guarantee you CBS would give up David Letterman for a chance at a Kansas-Kentucky basketball title game in prime time. Instead, we may get Butler-West Virginia.
That’s madness, alright.
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