How To Save
College Basketball
The college football perspective on how to make college hoops relevant
again.
By
Pete
Fiutak
Everyone likes to rail on college football for not doing the obvious
with its post-season. Of course it should have a playoff, right?
Everyone loves a playoff, everyone needs a playoff, and no one can quite
figure out why something isn’t done to fix the bizarre way college
football crowns its champion.
I feel the same way about college basketball, although for different
reasons.
College basketball has become all about March Madness, and while it
might be the best sporting event going, it has come at the expense of
the regular season.
College basketball used to be special. Even with the tournament, the
regular season was a must-see every week, and then, right about when the
Fab Five era at Michigan was coming to a close, a slew of key things
happened that killed the sport. 1) All the good freshmen never got on
campus, and the ones that turned into stars were done after a year.
Imagine what college hoops would’ve been if players like Kevin Garnett,
Kobe Bryant and Tracy McGrady had gone to school for two or three years.
There was no more star power. 2) The tournament got out of control. It
was always big, and then it took on a life of its own becoming a
completely different season and a totally different animal. 3) The field
expanded. Suddenly, the weak and sad in the top conferences were finding
their way into the field of 65. And finally, 4) the conference
tournaments began to mean everything when it came to crowning a
champion.
All of those factors killed the college basketball regular season making
it completely and totally irrelevant. While it could be argued that
college football has never been bigger, mostly because of the expanded
coverage on TV and the Internet, along with the fantastic regular
season, college basketball is worse off than it appears. Yeah, everyone
loves March Madness because of their brackets, but ratings have been
down the last few years and no one’s watching the regular season games.
With all of that in mind, I’m going to fix college basketball and make
it every bit as big as college football with one simple tweak: ditch the
conference tournaments and make the NCAA Tournament only available to
conference champions.
There was a time when you had to win your league title to have a shot at
the national championship, and now you have coaches of teams that
finished ninth in a league whining about not getting in. Of course, the
conference tournaments make too much money for them to go anywhere, and
there’s no way the multi-billion dollar Golden Goose of a tournament
will be messed with, but I’ll argue that my proposal would not only make
the NCAA Tournament bigger, but it would end up generating more revenue
for college basketball because everyone will be watching from December
to mid-March and not just for a two-day span until their brackets go
kaput.
Here’s how the tournament SHOULD be this season. Take the eight top
regular season conference champions and give them a bye, and have a
first round of the top 16 other conference champions for a total field
of 24 teams.
I know your immediate objection. Why would fans of a third-place team
have any interest in the season after a certain point? It’s simple. Why
do fans care in college football when their team has no hope of winning
a national championship? If you can’t win your conference title, you
don’t deserve to win the national title.
This season, the tournament seedings should be (remember, regular season
champions get in).
1.
North Carolina - ACC
2.
Louisville – Big East
3.
Michigan State – Big Ten
4. Memphis – Conference USA
5.
Kansas – Big 12
6.
Washington – Pac 10
7.
Xavier – Atlantic 10
8.
LSU - SEC
9.
Utah State – WAC
10. Butler - Horizon
11.
Gonzaga – West Coast
12. BYU – Mountain West
13.
Creighton – Missouri Valley
14.
Western Kentucky – Sun Belt
15. VCU – Colonial Athletic Assoc.
16.
Davidson - Southern
17.
Stephen F. Austin - Southland
18.
Buffalo - MAC
19. Cornell - Ivy
20. Radford – Big South
21.
Binghamton– America East
22. UT Martin – Ohio Valley
23.
Weber State – Big Sky
24.
Jacksonville – Atlantic Sun