Musings On March Madness

I am aware that two NCAA Tournament games happened last night and that two more are on tap for this evening.  However, my credentials as a Certified Codger allow me to consider that those so-called “First Four” games are the sporting equivalent of an amuse-bouche at a 3-star Michelin restaurant in the south of France.  As far as I am concerned, the real Tournament begins tomorrow.  So, let me offer some thoughts on the real Tournament here.

Normally, the huffing and puffing over which teams should be in versus which teams got in instead lasts about 36 hours.  This year, the folks in West Virginia seem to want to keep that debate alive for a long time.  According to reports, the State government will investigate how/why the Mountaineers were left out of the Tournament and how/why UNC got in.   And there have even been threats of litigation around all this.  Two thoughts here:

1. If you ever need to cite an example of “bad optics”, the fact that the Selection Committee was chaired by the Athletic Director of UNC would serve your purpose well.  If you think some sort of hanky-panky took place in the Committee Room, that obvious living and breathing conflict of interest will keep those thoughts alive for quite a while.
2. I am not a lawyer; nevertheless, I do not understand how litigation would work here.  I know that people file frivolous lawsuits periodically; but try as I may, I cannot come up with a basis for a real legal action.  If “West Virginia” sues the NCAA over this “atrocity”, the defense is that the Selection Committee method was agreed to by NCAA members as the definitive way to fill out the Tournament field.  If “West Virginia” sues the Selection Committee, that would turn into a “he said/she said situation” almost immediately.

The makeup of the field this year is dramatically different from years past.  Here is the conference breakdown:

• SEC:  14 teams made the tournament.  Usually, people think of the SEC as a “football conference”; not this year …
• Big-10:  8 teams made the tournament.  Given the expansion of the conference to include far western schools, perhaps this is not all that surprising
• Big-12:  7 teams made the tournament.  The big surprise here is that Kansas is seeded #7 in the West bracket.  I read somewhere that Bill Self has been the coach at Kansas since 2003; his teams have made the Tournament every season since then and none had ever been seeded lower than #4.
• Big East:  5 teams made the tournament.  There was a year when the Big East had three of the four teams in the Final Four.
•  ACC:  4 teams made the tournament.  There were years when four ACC teams would have all been seeded #4 or higher.  Now this …
• Mountain West:  4 teams made the tournament.
• West Coast: 2 teams made the tournament.

Please do not take the following as any sort of complaint about the Selection Committee’s work; this is just an observation:

• The SEC and the Big-10 got 22 teams in the tournament; 20 of them are at-large bids decided by the Selection Committee.
• All the other conferences combined to receive 17 at-large bids from the Selection Committee.
• Is college basketball really that unbalanced this year?

More specifically, if the Big-10 Conference Tournament final game between Michigan and Wisconsin represented the two best teams from that conference, how did 6 others find their way into the brackets this year?

If the brackets cooperate, we might see some themes in the Final Four this year.  For example, we might have a Canine Final Four:

1. Mississippi St. Bulldogs
2. Yale Bulldogs
3. UConn Huskies
4. Wofford Terriers

Additionally, the possibility exists for a Feline Final Four:

1. Auburn Tigers
2. Arizona Wildcats
3. Houston Cougars
4. Missouri Tigers

Finally, these words from John Wooden whose UCLA teams dominated the NCAA tournament in the 1960s and 70s:

“Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………