Tournament or tournament? A style question

This is something we run into every year about this time, and it's finally frustrated me enough to seek out opinions on it. Is it "NCAA Tournament" or "NCAA tournament"?
I've seen plenty of stories with the capital T and plenty with the lowercase. We usually make it a capital if it's referring to the entity of the tournament (Duke might miss the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 20 years) but lowercase if it's a generic reference (Duke needs to beat N.C. State to continue its streak of 20 straight NCAA tournament appearances). This year, though, it seems like 90 percent of the AP stories have it as lowercase, no matter the context.
So, for the sake of my sanity, which is it?

 

I think the way you do it is right. Specific, upper-case; generic, lower-case.

In general, though, I tell writers that if there's any doubt, go down-style with a title. We capitalize far too many titles.

 

It's down. NCAA tournament. If you're using the official name, you'd use NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship.

 

Agreed with shottie. Upstyle and hyphens are things that, if you ever have a question about using them, don't.

The Queef Falls Boys Soccer Team finished in second-place at the Tournament hosted by the Far Talot Boys Soccer Team.

Yeesh.

 

How about all caps with an increasing point size for each letter?

 

MM, you nailed another one of my pet peeves with the hyphen that shouldn't be.

"Podunkville, the second-seed in the tournament..."

NO. They can be second-seeded Podunkville. They are the "second seed," no hyphen.

 

Cosmo, it's an individual style thing, as with most of these kinds of things.

Unfortunately, our style is NCAA Tournament, along with ACC Tournament, SEC Tournament, etc.

Unfortunate because that's not AP's way, so it requires a few edits in every recap.

 

That's what's really been driving me nuts lately, is we've gotten into that with our high school tournaments too. So we have South State Tournament, District 5-1A Tournament, etc. We're getting carried away with it. AP needs to add something to the stylebook on this.

 

How hard is it to cap a T?

 

It isn't...but when it's a style tie, we usually go with AP so we don't miss the changes (like RBIs). But in this case, this style seems right, so we change them.

 

You could say the same thing about 6 2-3. How hard is it to change it to the fraction? It's not brain surgery. But it's one more thing you have to check in EVERY baseball gamer, including those gamers you get four minutes before deadline. And it's another search-and-replace you need to make in your boxscore macro.

Thing is, Blue, that's not the question to be asked. The question to be asked is why capitalize it if a majority of newspapers are just going to knock it down to lower-case anyway.

 

World Series -- proper noun, both caps
NBA Finals -- proper noun, both caps
Super Bowl -- proper noun, both caps
etc., etc.
The NCAA Tournament, in today's lexicon, is a proper noun, so both should be caps.
You want a real question: Why the hell in Game 4 of the World Series or NBA Finals is Game capitalized? That's downright retarded.