Why Conference Tournaments Are Great

I never used to be a big fan of conference tournaments in college basketball. It always seemed silly to me that most teams could play an entire regular season but have their chances at a berth into the NCAA tournament determined by how they fare during one week in March. 

But I've come around to thinking the conference tournaments are a great thing, because they build interest in the sport and give teams one last shot at proving they are one of the best teams in the country. 

In other words, the conference tournaments are a major reason why the notion of expanding the NCAA Tournament is just plain silly. 

Those pushing for an NCAA tournament expansion argue that other sports allow a greater percentage of their teams into postseason play. College basketball allows about 19 percent of its teams into the Big Dance, compared to 37.5 percent for the NFL, 27 percent for Major League Baseball.

But when you factor in the conference tournaments, the percentage of teams that have a chance to play for a National Championship is much more. In fact, it's more than 90 percent. 

Every conference, save for the Ivy League and fledgling Great West, provides an automatic berth to the conference tournament winner. Therefore, college basketball is by far the most inclusive when it comes to giving teams a chance to play for a national title. 

At the end of college basketball's regular season, the only teams that had no hope of playing their way to the National Championship were:

-The seven Ivy League teams other than season champ Cornell

-The seven independent teams

-The seven teams from the Great West conference, which does not offer an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament

-The bottom two teams from the Atlantic 10 (Fordham and LaSalle)

-The bottom four teams from the Northeast Conference. (Bryant, Wagner, Sacred Heart and St. Francis-NY)

In other words, you still have more 300 teams still capable of playing their way to a National Championship, even after the regular season is over. Absolutely none of the few excluded teams have a scintilla of a valid argument that they should be included in the tournament, and even if they did, they could always be considered for one of the tournament selection committee's at-large bids.  

As it stands now, conference tournaments offer a way for the NCAA selection committee to separate the wheat from the chaff in college hoops. But if the NCAA tournament were expanded to 96 teams, the conference tournaments would take on less importance. 

Comments

[Mony]

Good point, especially if the NCAA continues to give auto-bids to regular season champs to the NIT, which isn't terrible...

Though to clarify, this year some additional teams did not qualify for their conference tournaments: (http://www.timlemkesports.com/home/2010/03/why-conference-tournaments-are-great.html)
America East : Binghamton (school decision)
Atlantic Sun: the bottom 3 teams - Stetson, Florida Gulf Coast, South Carolina Upstate
Big Sky: the bottom 3 teams - Eastern Washington, Sacramento State, Idaho State
Big South: the bottom 2 teams - Gardner-Webb & Presbyterian
Big West: the bottom 1 teams - UC-Riverside
Summit: the bottom 2 teams - Centenary, Southern Utah
MEAC: Winston-Salem State (school decided to drop back to D-2)
Ohio Valley: the bottom 2 teams - Southeastern Missouri, UT-Martin
Pac-10: USC (school decision)
Southland: the bottom 4 teams - Lamar, McNeese State, Northwestern State, Central Arkansas
SWAC: the bottom 2 teams - Alcorn State, Southern
WAC: the bottom 1 teams - Hawaii

[TIm]

Thanks for pointing out the additional excluded teams...I had a feeling there might be more. Must not have examined the conference tourney brackets closely enough.

[Bob Lemke]

Tim

If the NCAA expanded the tournament to 96, LaSalle still would never get in.

Dad

[Craig]

I believe that conference tournaments actually hurt interest in the sport. Since automatic bids come from the tournament instead of conference play, people are losing interest in the regular season. In the past, we didn't have much interest in the pre conference games that teams played, because most of these were just preparation games for the more important conference games. The fans came out for the conference games. With the tournaments getting the bids, the conference games are starting to look more like just preparation games for the conference tournaments. This will hurt the attendence and interest in the conference season. Plus since most conference tournaments are held outside of the travel range of most college students, the conference tournaments won't draw nearly the interest that the conference competition could draw. We might have a nice huge all inclusive championship at the end, but hardly anyone will be able to really go to these games, and interest won't be as high as if you had a season to build fan interest through an important conference season.
Inclusive playoffs and tournaments mean nothing. It is rare for a bad team to do anything, and when they do, everyone complains that they just had a lucky streak. No one will respect the NCAA if an undeserving team happens to pull out a tournament win.