Running 2023-24 NCAA Basketball Thread

I get being wrapped up in your favorite school’s sportsball teams because hey, c’est moi. But I really hope you’ve developed some kind of mental escape plan for moving on. The athletes are no more emotionally invested in their colleges than nightclub strippers are in their patrons.

 

This is the last day in which I will be fully invested in the NCAA tournament as a fan. It's a weird event in that it's the most fun at the beginning and gets less fun as it goes along unless you are a devout fan of one of the teams in the Final Four or are still alive in your bracket pools. For the former, I will root for Yale as one of my brothers went there (figure that ends tonight). For the latter, well, long story short I'll go as far as Creighton can carry me.
The final with its 9:18 Eastern start is something I will almost surely not see in its entirety, nor will that bother me in the least.

 

I've long thought the regular season champ should get in, especially for the mids. The mid-major tournaments are financial zeroes for the leagues and, as we saw this year, you almost always run the risk of the best team over the long haul not getting in. But ADs and coaches love the long-shot lure of a tourney run saving their asses. "Damn straight," said Kevin Keatts.

 

So many columnists, commentators and pundits have no idea how the NCAA tournament works.

The NCAA just guarantees access to one automatic qualifier from each conference. The CONFERENCES determine who is the automatic qualifier. They choose the tournament champion because they want all of the teams invested in what would otherwise be a meaningless exercise to make money.

If the conference wants its regular-season champion to earn the automatic bid, it merely has to designate the regular-season champ as the recipient.

 

I'm invested enough in the season that I do care and watch the rest of the event, but you're right, it doesn't have the same pop. I really want to see a Houston-UConn final just for the contrast in styles. The thing I can't care at all about anymore is the NIT or any of the other tournaments. My school was in the NIT and I watched about five minutes combined of the two games. Pretty much forgot they were playing last night.

 

That’s a bad look for the school. Alumni look as if they’ve run off the AD who stood up for players. In this players rights era, that’s awkward.

 

I’d imagine ESPN regards whatever limited exposure they give the one-bid leagues in the regular season as a loss leader in order to get the sugar high of championship week. For that reason alone I doubt any of these conferences decide to ditch them. The profit comes from the Mouse, not selling 500 tickets at the Podunk Civic Center on a Wednesday afternoon.

 

The most underrated part of March Madness is when all the NBA color commentators come over from the Turner side and are unafraid to call out the wretched college officiating.

 

I am about to the point that I want the Fat Two to go ahead and break off and form their own semi-pro league. That implies that the ACC gets raided for Clemson and UNC, maybe Miami, and perhaps a school or two from the B12. Follow that by cutting loose the deadwood perennial cellar dwellers in the B1G and SEC. Let the big dogs go do their thing with their huge budgets and allow the remaining schools to form a secondary league that resembles more traditional college sports. Let's see how well the Vanderbilts, Marylands, Northwesterns and the like do without the huge budget advantage they currently have.

I have hated the idea of a G5 tournament as essentially accepting being permanently banned from the big boy table, but that's obviously coming. Let the top 36 or so take their ball and go, and the playing field gets more level for the remaining teams. Some will still enjoy advantages due to endowment and number of donating boosters and TV contracts, but the spread will no longer be as extreme as it currently is, particularly considering that the budget advantage at the top is about to be turbocharged. Possibly the remaining conferences do some revamping to build more sensible regional conferences, but that's probably too much to hope for.

 

It’s pretty to think so, but how do these next tier schools propose to exist outside of Supreme Court jurisdiction?