Imagine, for a moment, if the NCAA Tournament bracket didn’t have to include conference tourney winners.
Bombastic broadcaster Dick Vitale would not have had to follow through on his promise to stand on his head after Austin Peay stunned Illinois.
Jim Valvano’s “Cardiac Pack” probably would have missed the NCAA Tournament altogether in 1983, robbing the sport of one of its most inspiring national champions.
Am I laying it on thick enough?
Someone has to defend one of the best parts of the entire college basketball season, because it appears to be under attack.
If you love the annual intensity of Arch Madness and can’t wait to see Drake and Loyola go at it in St. Louis soon . . .
If you still think of Florida Gulf Coast’s 2013 run every time you see a perfectly executed alley-oop . . .
If you relished Murray State turned Memphis Grizzly guard Ja Morant’s sensational triple-double against Marquette in the 12th-seeded Racers’ takedown of fifth-seeded Marquette in 2019 . . .
I’m with you.
None of these March Madness memories — good or bad — would have been possible without conference tournaments providing automatic bids to the big dance for late-bloomers.
Norfolk State, second in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference regular-season standings, was without an NCAA Tournament spot until it won its conference tournament and stunned the second-seeded Missouri Tigers as a No. 15 seed in 2012.
Third-seeded Illinois never saw little No. 14 seed Austin Peay coming in 1987, and it would not have had to worry about the Governors at all if Richie Armstrong’s 30-footer had not beaten Eastern Kentucky in the Ohio Valley Conference tournament.
Florida Gulf Coast — remember Dunk City? — would not have captured our hearts in 2013 without an Atlantic Sun tournament championship that supplanted its second-place regular-season finish. Same for Morant’s Racers, who in 2019 beat co-regular-season-champion Belmont in the OVC tourney to set up their takedown of Marquette.
Folks tend to forget Valvano’s unforgettable NC State team’s epic run to glory started when the Wolfpack went from NCAA Tournament outsider to ACC tournament champion.
So, consider all of these examples before you simply buy into the idea that canceling or encouraging teams to opt out of conference tournaments is the right thing to do during this COVID-19-challenged college basketball season.
By now you have probably heard the popular arguments for the concept. No one who truly loves college basketball should agree with it.
A one-year elimination or wide-scale distortion of college basketball’s conference tournaments and their accompanying automatic NCAA Tournament bids could, theoretically, be viewed as a way to protect the NCAA Tournament from the pandemic. Advocates point to the calendar as evidence.
Selection Sunday is scheduled for March 14, with the First Four games following on March 18. But before teams that make the 68-team field can travel to Indiana to compete, members of the traveling party must string together seven consecutive passed COVID tests.
