Wednesday, 3/5/97
Conference tournaments: to be or not to be
Tourneys’ exciting, necessary precursor to already mad
March.
his is madness.
The nation is swept up in March Madness, but Pac-10 followers
can’t get excited just yet.
This weekend, conference tournament championships will be played
in every major conference in the nation. Some of the smaller
conferences have already held their own end-of-the-year
parties.
Meanwhile, the Pac-10 conference season ends with a whimper.
UCLA finishes its season on Saturday – already having clinched the
conference title – in a match-up with Washington State – a team
that has already lost its chances at even making the NIT.
We’re missing out. Conference tournament championships are just
too exciting to pass up.
* * *
"March Madness" just may be one of the most appropriate catch
phrases out there.
Of course there is the madness felt by those of us in the
audience, who know finals week starts March 16, but still cannot
wait to watch about 30 hours of hoops over the course of the
previous three days. Who has time to study for finals when you have
to update your tournament bracket every half hour?
But then there is the madness of the tournament itself. No
postseason tournament is more unpredictable, which is why it’s so
fun to try to predict what will happen. For example …
UCLA’s championship run in 1995 could have so easily ended with
a second-round loss to Missouri. Arkansas, the team they played in
the finals, almost lost in the first round that year, and then
barely escaped a loss to Syracuse in the second round – in a game
that finished just minutes after Tyus Edney saved the Bruins.
Speaking of Syracuse, who would have guessed that the Orangemen
would be in the finals last year? And who would’ve known they would
get there by beating Mississippi State in the Final Four? Syracuse
was one game away from winning the whole thing.
Which leads me to say that the nation’s best team does not
always win the NCAA Tournament. That’s what makes it
unpredictable.
Think of any professional sports’ playoffs. There are no office
pools for those, simply because everyone would make the same picks.
Surprises are few, and the best team will always come out on top in
a seven-game series.
The best team will not always come out on top in a single game.
Even the Bulls lose now and then. Even Kansas has lost a game this
year. To win the tournament, the Jayhawks need to win six in a row
against the best teams in the nation (make that five in a row
against the best in the nation after blowing out NE South Dakota
State Tech by 50 points in the first round), and to do that any
team needs a little bit of luck.
It’s the beauty of the NCAA tournament, and it’s also why every
other sport doesn’t adopt a similar format. The best team does not
necessarily win, but the tournament is as exciting as hell.
In fact, it’s madness.
* * *
But I was talking about conference tournaments before. What was
that tangent all about?
Conference tournaments bring an early dose of madness. Even more
teams have a chance to pull off an upset and get a shot at the
title. Even more meaning is placed on more single games toward the
end of the season, where you never know what’s going to happen.
Let’s say the Pac-10 had a conference tournament this year, and
Washington State took home the conference championship. Sure,
they’re not the conference’s best team, but who cares?
We’d all watch it on television, because it would mean
something. And if Pauley hosted it – damn. I would buy tickets to
that.
So the best team doesn’t win. So what. There are 34 at-large
bids for non-conference champions, so the regular season still does
mean something for all the major conferences.
For smaller conferences, there is the concern that conference
tournaments make the regular season completely meaningless (because
there is no way the Southern Valley River Conference is going to
get an at-large bid).
Oh well. It would still be better than getting rid of the
tournaments. Nothing would be more lame than to deprive all of the
conferences that you’ve never heard of from playing any sort of
conference tournament, just in the name of getting the conference’s
best team into the tournament. That wouldn’t be madness!
That would be a regular season ending prematurely, where one
team clinches the championship, in some game against the
conference’s cellar-dweller that nobody cares about. Then that
champion would have to play five meaningless games after clinching
its NCAA Tournament berth, then lose to Kentucky by 60.
Conference tournaments are more exciting, which is why they will
get better ratings this weekend than Big Ten and Pac-10 regular
season games.
And as far as making sure the best 64 teams are at the
tournament; well that goes against the whole spirit of the
tournament. If you prefer playoffs of the best-out-of-seven,
make-sure-the-best-team-wins variety, wait until April, May and
June.
As of now, the calendar reads March. We all know what that
means.
Dittmer is the Daily Bruin Sports Editor, and the president of
the organization titled, "Run Brent Boyd off Campus."Conference
tournaments bring an early dose of madness.
Mark Dittmer