March Madness Baby!

The pairings for the NCAA basketball tournament were announced on Sunday night, thus kicking off the three week celebration of college basketball called “March Madness”.  Dick Vitale, the loud, bald, self deprecating ESPN announcer has been the face of college basketball for decades.  I like Dick because his love for the game is pure and he adds to the fun.  Someday Dick will retire and it will be hard to imagine March Madness without him.

The NCAA tournament should be a simple bracket of 64 teams in a single elimination contest for the title of “National Champion”.  This year there are 68 teams with a convoluted system of play-in games for the lowest seeded teams prior to the official start.  Most of the talk on the CBS and ESPN selection shows were about the teams at the bottom of the list, those who barely made it in, and those who were left out.  The TV talking heads were unanimous in declaring that Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and the University of Alabama-Birmingham (UAB) should not have been included, and Colorado and Virginia Tech got the shaft.  Every team has a fair chance of qualifying for the “Big Dance”.  All they have to do is win their conference championship and the automatic bid that comes with that honor.  31 teams get automatic bids this way.  The remaining 37 at large slots are filled by the tournament committee who meets for several days sequestered in a hotel somewhere, poring over data like “bad losses”, “wins against the top 50”, and who knows what other criteria.  In other words, the at large teams are selected by opinion.  The committee process produces some strange results, like Georgia in and Alabama out.  This, despite Alabama having a better SEC record, and having beaten Georgia twice.  But I’m not bitter about Alabama not qualifying.  They were clearly a “bubble” team and hurt their chances by losing badly to Kentucky in the semi-finals of the SEC tournament. 

In fact, all the debate about the teams at the bottom of the bracket is really pointless because none of these teams are capable of winning the tournament.  There are realistically about 5 to 10 teams in any year that have the talent to win 6 straight games against increasingly tougher competition.  The objective of the tournament is to identify the best team in college basketball, so why should we worry about teams being left out when they probably only have the potential to win a game or two?  Virginia Tech, Colorado, or Alabama had no realistic chance to cut down the nets if they had gotten in.

Opinions about which team is better don’t affect the championship.  The winner will come from a group of teams that didn’t have to worry about whether they were on the bubble or not.  The national college basketball rankings are essentially meaningless unlike the rankings in college football which have way too much effect on determining the BCS football champion.  The champion will be decided on the court and three wonderful weeks of basketball await.