2020-2021 B1G Basketball Thread

[MaximumSam]

Market to whom?

Players

[medinabuckeye1]

that's what having a playoff has done, in his experience

As I understand @OrangeAfroMan ,I agree with his point.

A playoff does tend to suck all of the oxygen out of the room so to speak. It draws so much attention that everything else becomes secondary and can easily get lost and forgotten. 

Purdue basketball is a perfect example of this. As @betarhoalphadelta pointed out upthread the Boilermakers are an elite program since ~1980 when judged based on regular season performance.  In spite of that, basically nobody outside of Purdue fans sees them that way because to everyone else they are a program that hasn't been to the F4 in four decades. 

The same playoff-centric focus is developing in football. You have a distinct top three of Bama then Clemson then tOSU. After that there is a drop-off then it is debatable between Oklahoma (lots of appearances, no CFP wins) and a group of teams with a single CFP win each. Finally you have the teams that have one or two appearances and are 0-1 or 0-2. After that, on a national level, who cares? 

[betarhoalphadelta]

Oddly enough, the national champion in football or in basketball is one of the least meaningful, to me, things about the sport.

The CFP is irrelevant to a Purdue fan. I care about it in the same way a Camry owner cares about the Nurburgring lap times of Ferraris and Lambos... 

The tournament is great entertainment, but all my brackets are busted by the final weekend anyway. One if these years it'll be relevant because Purdue will be there, but my tournament interest typically wanes once Purdue is eliminated.

Then they put the national championship games for both sports on a Monday, a work day, and [for a West coaster] right in the middle of dinner prep / consumption time. Inconvenient for watching sports, to say the least...

[Brutus Buckeye]

Importance is in the eye of the beholder.

If you are a Midwestern guy who cares more about the MAC than the SEC, then in your world the MAC CCG is more important than the SEC CCG.

If you are a Buckeye fan who would rather beat Michigan than win the Big Ten Title, then THE GAME is more important than the Big Ten CCG.

If you like the Rose Bowl better than the NCG, then the Rose Bowl game is more important than the NCG from your vantage point.

Conversely if you let the woke sports media lead you around by the short and curlies to the point where you quit watching CFB because your favorite team is never in the playoff hunt, then that's a "you" problem.

[OrangeAfroMan]

Importance is in the eye of the beholder.

If you are a Midwestern guy who cares more about the MAC than the SEC, then in your world the MAC CCG is more important than the SEC CCG.

If you are a Buckeye fan who would rather beat Michigan than win the Big Ten Title, then THE GAME is more important than the Big Ten CCG.

If you like the Rose Bowl better than the NCG, then the Rose Bowl game is more important than the NCG from your vantage point.

Conversely if you let the woke sports media lead you around by the short and curlies to the point where you quit watching CFB because your favorite team is never in the playoff hunt, then that's a "you" problem.

Rational point.
Rational point
Rational point.
WTF?  Being against an expanded playoff is now woke?  Says who?  Go bitch and moan and boycott over a guy kneeling during a song, snowflake.

[bayareabadger]

Then they put the national championship games for both sports on a Monday, a work day, and [for a West coaster] right in the middle of dinner prep / consumption time. Inconvenient for watching sports, to say the least...

Don’t worry, it’s worse timing out my way

[OrangeAfroMan]

Gonzaga made an Elite 8 their second tournament ever. Five years later, they were a 2 seed. Their best win was against 20-12 Maryland. The only lost two games, both to very excellent teams.

This story you are spinning isn't really true or comparable at all. I'm sorry.

They didn't make the Elite 8 their 2nd tourney ever.  And yes, 5 years later, they were a 2 seed.  So my crime again was being off by a few years, yet what I said happened did happen.
Gonzaga got 2 rounds further than expected (by seeding) their first 2 trips, so their seeding improved.  Except the first time they were a high seed (2) they pooped the bed in the 2nd round.  
Theen they went about 8 years with 6+ losses, so that time frame becomes irrelevant to the discussion.  
When they get back to very few losses, they were a 1 seed for the first time and abruptly lost in the 2nd round.  Basically, if you look at it, you see how much of a crapshoot the seeding process seems to be, and that it's possible Gonzaga benefitted from their first 2 Cinderella runs way after the fact.
.
The two sports' situations are too different to really compare.  If I initiated that, then that's my bad.

[ELA]

To me it boils down to college football is way too far on the side of actually letting the best team be national champion, and college basketball being way too far on the entertainment side.

Where you fall, is how important each is to you. And I think the end result of basketball is closer to producing a true champion than college football is to producing an entertaining race to get there. At least when it was two teams, there was entertainment in the fact that one fluky loss could end you, and a team that wasn't actually the best, could get enough breaks to get there. Going from 2 to 4 has eliminated those things more or less, and has sucked too much of the entertainment out of the national championship chase.

I think we could comfortably go to 8, and I still don't think you would see a bunch of fluky national champions.  How many upsets have we seen in the CFP? Let alone a team pulling off three of those in a row. I think that would strike a good balance between entertainment and allowing the best team to win it.  A 5-1-2 model.  I kind of like the idea of working in some sort of group of five tournament to determine who gets that one bed, even if that is not plausible. Maybe you get rid of their conference championship games, and have the two best group of five teams play each other during championship weekend?

[bayareabadger]

They didn't make the Elite 8 their 2nd tourney ever.  And yes, 5 years later, they were a 2 seed.  So my crime again was being off by a few years, yet what I said happened did happen.

They didn't?

The first tournament the Bulldogs ever made was in 1995. The second was in 1999. I'm looking at a couple reference sites, they seem to say Gonzaga was one of the last 8 teams in the field?

[bayareabadger]

To me it boils down to college football is way too far on the side of actually letting the best team be national champion, and college basketball being way too far on the entertainment side.

Where you fall, is how important each is to you. And I think the end result of basketball is closer to producing a true champion than college football is to producing an entertaining race to get there. At least when it was two teams, there was entertainment in the fact that one fluky loss could end you, and a team that wasn't actually the best, could get enough breaks to get there. Going from 2 to 4 has eliminated those things more or less, and has sucked too much of the entertainment out of the national championship chase.

I think this split is interesting because it points to the fact that both systems, especially old CFB are a little prone to flukiness, with CFB's being understated. In a tournament setting, we have so many teams, we see the upsets, and seasons actually end, rather than sort of bleeding out slowly. 

A year like 2014 is a great example. We saw how it played out in real life, a couple weird things came together to get OSU in, OSU was the hot team. If it's two teams, you have all the fluky stuff that kept FSU unbeaten and the fluky losses that would've kept TCU/OSU/Baylor out, as the SEC mulligan, the forgiveness of one fluky loss built in, would've put a Bama team that likely would've rocked FSU as it did ND two years prior. And if it was the really old system (pre-bowl coalition), lord knows who FSU would've played? They would've controlled the cards, with Bama in the wings?  

[bayareabadger]

 

Conversely if you let the woke sports media lead you around by the short and curlies to the point where you quit watching CFB because your favorite team is never in the playoff hunt, then that's a "you" problem.

Setting aside the sort of circular question of the "woke" media, I think by and large, we as a people do often get caught up in so much of the hubbub. That's always been part of the sport, where rankings, a deeply silly exercise done by people we mostly have low opinions of, draw a great deal of attention and outrage.

Medina mentioned "A playoff does tend to suck all of the oxygen out of the room," and it strikes me as something that says more about the viewer than the actual process. I can watch CFB 3-5 nights a week most of the season. I can consume coverage from the one schlub who covers Miami (Ohio), from the blog that covers the Sun Belt, from the Columbus Dispatch, from a stats nerd I like, from my friends on a Big Ten Message Board. 

I consume relatively little in the way of ESPN analysts unless the coverage is vetted as interesting by someone I trust (emphasis on interesting, not anger triggering, which is what a lot of people direct others to). I don't need to. I have all the CFB info I want and more, and I don't need to go to Herbie or Finebaum for it. 

[MaximumSam]

To me it boils down to college football is way too far on the side of actually letting the best team be national champion, and college basketball being way too far on the entertainment side.

Where you fall, is how important each is to you. And I think the end result of basketball is closer to producing a true champion than college football is to producing an entertaining race to get there. At least when it was two teams, there was entertainment in the fact that one fluky loss could end you, and a team that wasn't actually the best, could get enough breaks to get there. Going from 2 to 4 has eliminated those things more or less, and has sucked too much of the entertainment out of the national championship chase.

I think we could comfortably go to 8, and I still don't think you would see a bunch of fluky national champions.  How many upsets have we seen in the CFP? Let alone a team pulling off three of those in a row. I think that would strike a good balance between entertainment and allowing the best team to win it.  A 5-1-2 model.  I kind of like the idea of working in some sort of group of five tournament to determine who gets that one bed, even if that is not plausible. Maybe you get rid of their conference championship games, and have the two best group of five teams play each other during championship weekend?

Don't you do the simulation where every conference champion makes it? I kind of like that - maybe have some byes for the top teams, throw in some at large teams to make the numbers right.  

[OrangeAfroMan]

Players

So Gonzaga is reeling in great classes with their sales pitch?  Why don't you go look that up and get back to me.

[OrangeAfroMan]

To me it boils down to college football is way too far on the side of actually letting the best team be national champion, and college basketball being way too far on the entertainment side.

Been sayin' it for years.