Winner Takes All

It's March, which means a lot of college basketball posts here on Caught Looking (as opposed to April, which will likely be dominated by baseball).  While I absolutely love the first few rounds of the NCAA tournament (how could you not?), I find Championship Week almost as exciting.  For major conferences such as the Big East and the Pac-10, the tournaments feature some excellent basketball and give bubble teams a chance to prove themselves against some of the top competition in the country.

But what about tournaments for smaller, one-bid conferences?  While the tournament-winner-gets-the-NCAA-bid format certainly adds a lot of excitement to the first week in March, I think it's bad for these smaller conferences.  Teams play an entire conference season from December through February, jockeying for position against rivals.  The conference tournaments render much of that irrelevant - while regular season standings determine tournament seeding, teams can still come out of nowhere and steal NCAA bids from the top teams in the conference.  For leagues whose regular season champion has no realistic chance at an at-large bid, wouldn't it make sense for these leagues to skip the postseason tournaments and guarantee that their best squads go to the NCAAs?

Of course, I'm biased here - this is how the Ivy League (and only the Ivy League) operates.  This year, the Ivy has two dominant teams - Princeton and Harvard - and those two teams tied for the top spot in the conference after Tuesday's regular season finale.  Because of the tie, the Crimson and Tigers will battle in a winner-take-all game for the NCAA bid Saturday at Yale.  By foregoing the conference tournament, the Ivy has ensured that only its top two teams have a chance to represent the conference in the NCAAs - there's no chance that a Yale or Penn could steal the bid and embarrass the conference with an exceptionally weak first-round performance.

The post-season tournaments in small conferences are a classic example of shortsightedness in sports.  Conferences are desperate for short term gains and attention, so they use tournaments to generate a little excitement and extra revenue at the end of each season.  Instead, what these conferences should be focused on is guaranteeing that their top teams represent the conference on an annual basis and hoping that these schools can knock off a BCS-conference school every couple of years.  It's big tournament wins that will really build momentum for small conferences (like Cornell's wins did for the Ivy League last year), not gimmicky conference tournaments that put sub-250 RPI schools in the NCAA tournament.