NCAA tourney expansion?

There are 334 Division I men's basketball teams.

Let them all in. Every single one.

Stage 39 rattail play-in games to cut the field to 256. (And hoo-baby, won't THOSE be exciting games. No. 257 West Montana Cattle Processing College vs. No. 334 Idaho Institute for the Incontinent. Tonight on ESPN!! Boo-Yah!!!)

Seed the top 64 teams by whatever system you want, and have each of them host a 4-team district tournament on their home court, with all other teams selected strictly geographically by computer.

When you have your 64 district winners, you select the NCAA Tournament as it is done currently. Nobody can cry over who's in and who's out. Everybody had their chance.

Of course, everybody has their chance already. But that won't shut the whiners up. Of course, they'll be bitching about who gets the top-64 seeds. "It's not fair!!!" It's always something.

 

Yeah, won as much as it could have against non-tourney competition. When they played big schools/NCAA tournament qualifiers/contenders:

Notre Dame 69, Hofstra 50
Hofstra 64, St. John's 51

And that's pretty much it. They loaded up with the likes of Binghamton, Stony Brook, Florida International, Dartmouth, St. Francis (NY), LaSalle and Siena. They had a gaudy W-L, but really, wouldn't anyone with NCAA ambitions done at least as well with that schedule? As it happens, this year was a bit skewy and as such, Hofstra and say Fla. State or Maryland probably WERE about level. But in a normal year for the ACC, you'd be hard-pressed to say 2005-06 Hofstra deserved it more. Hell, Texas A&M-Corpus Christi has won 20 games or more the last two years, why not them? (rhetorical question; their schedule includes things like Texas A&M International and Houston-Tillotson).

 

Hofstra 77, George Mason 66
Hofstra 58, George Mason 49

That's Hofstra's beef, right there.  Either they both should be in or they both should be out. The Final Four run suggests the former.

P.S. I'm ignoring Starman's latest response.  Now he's whining about whiners.

 

The whole thread is about whiners.

Any coach who cannot get into the NCAA tournament, as it is currently constituted, is a whiner.

 

George Mason had a road win against Wichita State, which Hofstra couldn't match. I might have taken Hofstra over GMU myself, but it's not a World Cup referee-level debacle that the Pride didn't get in.

Plus Hofstra made a nice run in the NIT, which good for them, but they ended it by losing to the fourth-best team in the CAA in Old Dominion, which was never seriously considered anything but an NIT team.

 

That's nice. We've discussed this, though. South Carolina beat Florida twice. So they should have been in, right? Great, Hofstra beat George Mason twice. But tournament bids are handed out on the basis of an entire season of work. Hofstra also lost to Towson. George Mason didn't. Hofstra played nobody in the non-conference season. And by nobody I mean St. John's. I'm not saying Hofstra didn't deserve a bid. They deserved one as much as Utah F***ing State did. (Hi Idaho). But to say Hofstra should have been in simply because they beat George Mason twice shows an ignorance to the process at a whole.

 

But it looks really, really bad because Geo. Mason's AD was on the selection committee. They can give all the lip service they want about him not being in the room when the decision is made, but you think they're not going to cover each other's asses? I think the WAC commissioner was on the committee, which might explain the charity shown to Air Force.

 

Air Force is in the Mountain West now, however. Still, somebody obviously was pleading the Flyboys' case.

And as much as GMU obviously proved its worthiness, if anyone doesn't think having its AD on the committee helped the Patriots out that Sunday, well then you're living in a fantasy world.

 

It didn't hurt, no, but when you looked at things subjectively, George Mason was on a different plane of thought than Hofstra. I honestly believe the two were not compared to each other. George Mason, thanks to sharing the title and getting a late quality road win against Wichita, was firmly in the "lock" by the time we got midway through Selection Sunday, while Hofstra was still in the hard bubble category. Seeing as we had an at-large getting a 13 seed (Bradley), an 11 as a lock makes sense.

 

Check out the final NCAA RPI from last season. See how many "quality" teams were left out:

http://web1.ncaa.org/app_data/weeklyrpi/rpi1.html

 

My God, there are teams with losing records in the top 128 in RPI.....

 

I know we've had all of these arguments before, but this is something I wanted to mention that we might not have said back then.

You mentioned Mason's win at Wichita, part of Bracket Busters. No question that helped GMU a lot, and there's no question that Hofstra skedded badly last season. No way to defend that non-conference sked.

But, why did ESPN give Hofstra a home game against Siena on BB Saturday? That was a no-win situation for Hofstra. Win, and it won't help, as the Pride discovered. Lose, and you're really toast. Wonder what Hofstra would have done at Wichita State? Probably lost. But we'll never know.

Seems to me the Bracket Buster is just another inequity in a system full of them.