CFB51 College Football Fan Community
The Power Five => Big Ten => Topic started by: medinabuckeye1 on March 11, 2020, 01:32:09 PM
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This is something of an ongoing rant of mine. I didn't put it in the BB thread (https://www.cfb51.com/big-ten/2019-2020-b1g-basketball-thread/) because it is a related but somewhat separate topic about the NCAA Tournament itself.
My long-running complaint is that CBB as it is currently construed is extremely unfair to major conference teams. According to the NCAA's NET metric the best 68 CBB teams are in just 13 leagues:
- 12 are in the B1G
- 9 are in the Big East
- 9 are in the SEC
- 7 are in the ACC
- 7 are in the P12
- 6 are in the Big 12
- 5 are in the A10
- 5 are in the AAC
- 3 are in the WCC
- 2 are in the MWC
- 1 is in the SoCon
- 1 is in the MVC
- 1 is in the ASUN
The other 19 leagues have a grand combined total of zero tournament-quality teams. Their best teams are ranked in the 70's (Ivy, MAC, Southland, Am East). Most of these other conferences (14 of 19) do not even have a team in the top-100, five do not have a team in the top-136 (double the tournament size) and two (SWAC, MEAC) do not have a team in the top-200.
This is grossly unfair to a major conference team such as Minnesota and Purdue. According to the NCAA's NET rankings the Gophers are the 44th best team in the nation. There are 68 slots in the tournament so they should easily be in but alas, they are two games under .500 so they likely need to go on a ridiculously improbable run of beating Northwestern (#159), Iowa (#34), Illinois (#39) either Wisconsin (#24), Michigan (#25), or Rutgers (#31), then either Michigan State (#7), Ohio State (#16), Maryland (#18), Purdue (#33), Penn State (#35), Indiana (#59), or Nebraska (#196) to make it in. Worse, they have to accomplish this in five games in five days.
This is grossly unfair to teams like Minnesota and Purdue as well as similarly situated teams in other strong leagues.
It also makes the tournament LESS entertaining. I know a lot of people will disagree at least at first, but hear me out:
The bottom four or so seeds (#13-#16) are generally the league tournament champions of the 19 leagues referred to above which do not have a single team that is actually tournament-worthy. Thus, instead of getting tournament-worthy teams from those leagues, we simply get the "tallest midget" out of the MEAC, SWAC, etc.
Most people love the upsets but how many upsets are there, really?
- 1-139: #16 seeds have one win ever in 140 tries.
- 8-132: #15 seeds have 8 wins in 140 tries (roughly one every 4-5 years) against the #2 seeds.
- 21-119: #14 seeds have 21 wins in 140 tires (roughly three every five years) against the #3 seeds.
- 29-111: #13 seeds have 29 wins in 140 tries (roughly four every five years) against the #4 seeds.
It gets worse in the second round:
- 0-1: The one #16 seed that made it to the second round lost.
- 1-7: Only one #15 seed has ever made the S16.
- 2-19: Only two #14 seeds have ever made the S16.
- 6-23: Only six #13 seeds have ever made the S16.
It ends the second weekend:
- 0-9: The nine 13-15 seeds that made the S16 ALL lost their S16 game.
These crappy teams are simply irrelevant to the National Championship. No team seeded #13 or worse has EVER made it to even the E8.
My view is that we should do one of two things, either:
- Cut the tournament down to just 32 teams (because no #9-16 seed has EVER won a F4 game), or
- Expand the tournament to 80 teams.
The purpose of expanding the Tournament to 80 teams would be threefold:
- To reduce the disparity between the best teams left out and the worst teams included, and
- To improve the quality of opponents for the top seeds in the early rounds, and
- To make the tournament schedule better for fans.
Point 1:
Using this year as an example, there will be multiple teams like Purdue and Minnesota from good leagues with ~.500 records ranked in the 30's-40's left out. There will also be multiple leagues that produce champions who couldn't realistically compete with Purdue's or Minnesota's second stringers. Adding 12 more at-large teams would alleviate that at least somewhat.
Point 2:
As pointed out above, those "tallest midget" league champions have a dismal record in the tournament. The bottom four seeds are a combined 59-501 (.011) in the first round, 9-50 (.015) in the second round and none have EVER won a S16 game. As you will see below, making them face a better team first would improve the quality of opponents for the top teams leading to more upsets and a more exciting tournament.
Point 3:
I've always thought it was silly that the busiest two days of the tournament are the first two, a Thursday and a Friday. Most of the fans are at work trying to sneak peeks at our phones to check scores. My plan fixes that.
My proposal would be to expand the tournament to 80 teams by effectively making the #13-#16 seeds ALL face a "play-in". My schedule would be as follows:
First weekend:
Thursday/Friday:
- Each of the eight sites would host two games, eight games per day, 16 games total to get down to 64 teams. Since there would only be eight games per day they could start later in the day and all or at least most of them could be played when fans could actually watch.
Saturday/Sunday:
- Each of the eight sites would host four games, 16 games per day, 32 games total to get down to 32 teams. Thus, the busiest two days of the tournament would be a Saturday and a Sunday so people would be off work and could watch.
Monday/Tuesday:
- Each of the eight sites would host two games, eight games per day, 16 games total to get down to 16 teams.
Second Weekend:
Saturday/Sunday:
- Each of the four sites would host two games, four games per day, eight games total to get down to eight teams.
Monday/Tuesday:
- Each of the four sites would host one game, two games per day, four games total to get down to four teams.
Third weekend:
Saturday:
- The Final Four site would host two games to get down to two teams.
Monday:
- The National Championship game.
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Conference data from the NCAA's NET site (yesterday) related to the above:
(https://i.imgur.com/lmrEjFS.png)
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I know some people will say that those crappy league champions won their league championship. To that I would say: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlBr2fyqn9g (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlBr2fyqn9g)
Then they might say that Purdue or Minnesota has the opportunity to win their league Championship. Well, they do, but it is several orders of magnitude more difficult than winning any of the worst dozen or so leagues. Minnesota's path:
- #159 Northwestern on Wednesday
- #34 Iowa on Thursday
- #39 Illinois on Friday
- #24/25/31 Wisconsin/Michigan/Rutgers on Saturday
- #7/16/18/33/35/59/196 MSU/tOSU/UMD/PU/PSU/IU/UNL on Sunday
That requires AT LEAST three wins over teams ranked in the top-40 and four unless either IU or UNL also makes it all the way to the CG.
Our worst team, Nebraska, would be the best in the MEAC and SWAC. Our second worst, Northwestern, would be the best in those as well as the NEC. Our third worst team (#59 IU) would be the best team in 19 of the 32 leagues and the Hoosiers would be the top-4 in two more.
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I have no interest in making the regular season even worse.
If you want to get rid of auto-bids, and cut the tournament size in half, ok. But none of those teams have any justifiable claim to be national champ, so I'd rather watch a team win it's way in, than watch a .500ish team from a major conference.
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The NCAA tournament is a spectacle, nothing more. It is a ridiculous way to crown a champion, but it is exciting and creates great ratings. The thing is that's the point of sport: entertainment. It does that: it entertains. If crowning the most appropriate champion were actually the goal, it would look completely different.
Specifically to your point: Minnesota and Purdue have no business being anywhere near a basketball championship for 2020. That a bunch of the other teams who will be in the tournament don't either doesn't mean Minnesota and Purdue are getting the short end of things.
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Obviously Purdue fans are sweating it this year when we have a decent team but a horrific schedule and so we're barely above .500.
But if we don't make it, I won't mind. To be honest, we don't have a legitimate shot at the NC either. I do think this team, when it plays to their potential, can compete with anyone in the country. But we haven't shown the ability to string together more than ~2 of those performances in a row, especially on the road or neutral sites, and so I don't think for a second that we can do so 6 times against the best teams in the country (and we'd be seeded such that we'd face top-8 seeds in every round unless there's a broken bracket).
We all know the 13-16 seeds aren't going anywhere. But neither are the 9-12 seeds even though occasionally they get hot and make the FF. They get there and face a legitimately great team and get beat.
I like the current format. I'd drop it to 64 because the whole "First Four" thing IMHO, but I enjoy when some of those 13-15 seeds end the run of a better team ahead of them. It doesn't happen often, but you can't sleep on those teams because they're often "up" for the game because it's the only chance they have to be on the national stage.
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I don't know how you'd do it, but there probably needs to be a 1A and 1AA in hoops.
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My view is that we should do one of two things, either:
- Cut the tournament down to just 32 teams (because no #9-16 seed has EVER won a F4 game), or
- Expand the tournament to 80 teams.
These points seem to contradict each other, why add more teams if they aren't good enough to win anyway?
If you want to eliminate the crappy teams then switch to 16 or 32 and host best of three series, this is far more likely to advance the best team each round.
Adding more teams dilutes the product as now the crappy teams are playing other crappy teams (compared to those making the tournament) and the idea of a cinderalla or upset is what's exciting, this decreases the likelihood of that happening.
I tend to disagree with the "Why" of this argument. The tournament is wildly entertaining and captivating to millions of viewers. No, significant upsets aren't regular, but it's the potential that captivates so many and builds the excitement. And there are enough strong and deserving teams that a worth champion is almost always crowned. I think the idea of trying to upset this apple cart has to be based on the desire for a truer national champion or change for change's sake, neither of which seem to be an outstanding problem.
If I were going to do anything to the tournament, I'd eliminate the 1st four. I watch every random conference tournament and virtually every tournament game, I've never watched one of the first 4 games.
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Thought this was about the Corona Virus - I'll show myself out
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Thought this was about the Corona Virus - I'll show myself out
NCAA tourney's going to be played in front of empty stands this year.
Maybe.
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I have no interest in making the regular season even worse.
If you want to get rid of auto-bids, and cut the tournament size in half, ok. But none of those teams have any justifiable claim to be national champ, so I'd rather watch a team win it's way in, than watch a .500ish team from a major conference.
Personally, I disagree with this simply because the .500ish team from a major conference (ie PU and MN) is vastly better than the "tallest midget" from the MEAC. I'd rather see better teams.
The NCAA tournament is a spectacle, nothing more. It is a ridiculous way to crown a champion, but it is exciting and creates great ratings. The thing is that's the point of sport: entertainment. It does that: it entertains. If crowning the most appropriate champion were actually the goal, it would look completely different.
I agree with entirely.
Specifically to your point: Minnesota and Purdue have no business being anywhere near a basketball championship for 2020. That a bunch of the other teams who will be in the tournament don't either doesn't mean Minnesota and Purdue are getting the short end of things.
I strongly disagree. Just because PU and MN aren't NC caliber doesn't mean that they aren't getting the short end of things. Assuming they miss the tournament, they are going to be deprived of that spot to make room for a bunch of teams that they are VASTLY better than. That is getting the short end of things.
But if we don't make it, I won't mind. To be honest, we don't have a legitimate shot at the NC either. I do think this team, when it plays to their potential, can compete with anyone in the country. But we haven't shown the ability to string together more than ~2 of those performances in a row, especially on the road or neutral sites, and so I don't think for a second that we can do so 6 times against the best teams in the country (and we'd be seeded such that we'd face top-8 seeds in every round unless there's a broken bracket).
I get that. I feel about the same with Ohio State. Like Purdue, the Buckeyes have some great wins (over #8 Kentucky in Vegas, over #11 Nova by 25 points, over #12 Maryland). Those give me hope in any game against any opponent, Kansas included. On the other hand, this team has not given me any reason to believe that they can string together six straight performances at that level.
We all know the 13-16 seeds aren't going anywhere. But neither are the 9-12 seeds even though occasionally they get hot and make the FF. They get there and face a legitimately great team and get beat.
You are exactly right. I noted above that no #13 or worse has ever won a second weekend game and no #9 or worse has ever won a third weekend game. It might happen someday but if it does it will almost certainly be because two of them got there and one of them had to win.
I like the current format. I'd drop it to 64
My big objection to that would be that it would deprive two pretty good major conference teams of a spot because they compromised and made it the last four at-large and the last four auto-bids. It should have been the last four auto-bids. The last four auto-bids are horrible, the last for at-large are mediocre.
These points seem to contradict each other, why add more teams if they aren't good enough to win anyway?
I don't think they contradict but I can see why you read it that way. What I was trying to say was that if you are going to include a bunch of teams that don't have a legitimate chance then you should at least include the BEST teams that don't have a legitimate chance rather than a bunch of crappy "tallest midgets".
If you want to eliminate the crappy teams then switch to 16 or 32 and host best of three series, this is far more likely to advance the best team each round.
I would love that, but as a practical matter it would never happen. What makes the tournament so exciting is the one-and-done nature of it. Kansas appears to be the best team in the country this year but if they have an off night next weekend they'll miss the S16. That is exciting.
Adding more teams dilutes the product as now the crappy teams are playing other crappy teams (compared to those making the tournament) and the idea of a cinderalla or upset is what's exciting, this decreases the likelihood of that happening.
I disagree for two reasons:
- The twelve teams this would add wouldn't be crappy teams, they'd be mediocre teams like Minnesota and Purdue.
- Forcing the truly crappy teams (roughly the bottom 16 or so auto-bids) to play mediocre teams before they got to play legitimate teams (the top-4 seeds that they play in what is now the first round) would result in substantially better 13-16 seeds (or their 17-20 seed replacements) and give the top-4 seeds much stiffer competition.
As I noted in my original post, the #13-16 seeds are terrible. They are just 59-501 (.011) in the first round. The crux of my proposal is to weed them out before the legitimate teams start playing. Teams like PU and MN have a MUCH better chance of taking down a top-4 seed than the MEAC Champion. This would absolutely NOT decrease the likelihood of upsets happening.
If I were going to do anything to the tournament, I'd eliminate the 1st four. I watch every random conference tournament and virtually every tournament game, I've never watched one of the first 4 games.
Bwar mentioned that also, I'm going to get back to it.
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The underlying reason for my proposal is to weed out the worst of the "tallest midget" conference champions.
Since they added the "First Four", we now have 68 teams in the tournament but the bottom 16 or so are just plain horrible.
I'd love to eliminate the First Four except that doing that while keeping all 32 auto-bids would mean that we'd lose four decent at-large teams and the vast disparity between the best teams left out and the worst teams in would get even larger.
I think this is less practical, but an alternative that I would be thrilled with would be to eliminate the First Four and make the auto-bids conditional on having at least one team in your league in the top-100 of the final NET rankings (or some other agreed upon ranking such as KenPom).
Here are the 32 leagues sorted by the ranking of their best team (per NET as of yesterday):
(https://i.imgur.com/EguwYvg.png)
If you made the auto-bid conditional on having at least one team from your league in the top-100 it would result in this:
- The top 17 leagues (down through Am East) would be pretty safely in.
- About four leagues (CUSA, BSKY, OVC, WAC) would be borderline. If their top team won their league tournament they would probably be ok but if not maybe not.
- The worst 11 auto-bids would be eliminated because none of their teams are in the top-100.
That way you would have about 17-21 auto-bids and 43-47 at-large teams instead of 32 auto-bids and 36 at-large as it is now.
The net effect would roughly be:
- The current 16 seeds (remember there are six of them with the play-in) would be booted.
- The current 15 seeds would be booted.
- Some of the current 14 seeds would be booted with the rest moved to 16 seeds.
- The current 13 seeds would be moved to 15 and 16 seeds.
- The current 12 seeds would be moved to 14 and 15 seeds.
- The current "first four out" would become 11 and 12 seeds.
- The current "next four out" would become 12 and 13 seeds.
- The next few teams out would become the rest of the 13 and 14 seeds.
IMHO, this would substantially improve the tournament because it would give you better teams at the 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16 lines than what you have now. That would substantially improve the likelihood of early round upsets.
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I don't want more early round upsets, if it's Purdue or Washington or whatever. Those happen. None of those lower seeded teams deserve to win a title. Arguing that the bad Power conference teams are better, isn't the point. That's a straw man argument, nobody is arguing they are. It's simply that any team to come from that spot isn't deserving of a title, so it's a better entertainment product (and again that's all this is) to let teams win their way in, rather than allow better, but .500 Power Five teams.
Sure, there would probably be an uptick in upsets, but it's not just upsets that make the tourney, it's that the upsets come from Middle Tennessee, Hampton, UMBC, and the like. If a Minnesota pulls a 15 over 2 upset, who cares? And Minnesota is just as undeserving of a national championship as UMBC.
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I hope I can get this to post right, it should be a chart showing the # of all-time first and second round wins by seed:
(https://i.imgur.com/PPE8Pot.png)
Note the humongous drop-off between #12 and #13. The #12 seeds are 50-90 all-time against the #5 seeds but the #13 seeds are only 29-111 against the #4 seeds.
The #4 seeds aren't THAT much better than the #5 seeds. Instead, this is a result of the way that the bracket is constructed. The top 11-12 seeds in each region are legitimate teams. The bottom 4-5 seeds in each region are "tallest midget" champions of weak leagues that have to be fit in somewhere based on the rules. Once you get past the top 11 or 12 seeds you are out of decent teams and just slotting in the crap.
The motivation behind my proposal is to eliminate that. I'd love to do it by adopting my proposed conditional auto-bid but I think too many people have too much interest in that auto-bid for every league. Thus, my alternative would be to expand to 80 teams and force those bottom 16 league champions to beat a decent team before we'll give them a shot at a great team.
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D1 is going to keep growing. Some schools will drop (eg. Savannah State most recently) but many more will replace them (recently / next are Dixie State, UC San Diego, Merrimack, Tarleton State, North Alabama, Bellarmine....) I don't begrudge them the option..... To be fair, it has worked out well for some schools (Boise State and UCF were in D2 until 30-40 years ago, North Dakota State has dominated FCS football and been decent in basketball since joining D1).
It won't happen for basketball, but I do think it would make some sense to split D1 for sports that have a lot of programs (softball, soccer, volleyball, etc.), but it'll never happen.
As for the Basketball tournament, there's no reason not to go back to 64 teams. That's how it is on the women's side with the same number of conferences, and the First Four teams are rarely very good (VCU's final four run aside)..... They won't ever shrink the field further for the same reasons they wouldn't go below 64 in soccer, baseball, softball, and volleyball. Every conference is going to get an autobid while still making room for the top 30-40 teams overall.
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My big objection to that would be that it would deprive two pretty good major conference teams of a spot because they compromised and made it the last four at-large and the last four auto-bids. It should have been the last four auto-bids. The last four auto-bids are horrible, the last for at-large are mediocre.
I would love that, but as a practical matter it would never happen. What makes the tournament so exciting is the one-and-done nature of it. Kansas appears to be the best team in the country this year but if they have an off night next weekend they'll miss the S16. That is exciting.
What makes it exciting is primarily that it's one of those sporting events [like the Super Bowl] that people who would normally never pay attention do so, and the reason they do so is the bracket.
That's why I say drop it to 64, or if it has to be 68, make ALL of the play-in games for the 16 seeds. That way it's the weakest teams that have to justify themselves, not the teams [like you say] such as Purdue and Minnesota that are FAR better than any 13-16 seed, fighting for their spot.
But I'd rather get rid of it entirely. Because the first four end up not "factoring" into the bracket because most brackets aren't due until games start on Thursday morning and basically you are forced to pick "whichever team wins the Tues/Wed games". I just don't like the feel of it.
The other bit of it if you expand to 80, you are basically giving up on the cinderellas. It's FUN when a 14 beats a 3. But what if that 14 is, for example. 16-16 Purdue? So they play some terrible 19-seed auto-bid. Is anyone going to be excited about a 19 beating a 14? No. Is anyone going to be excited about a high-major team like Purdue beating a 3 as a 14? No. For the life of me I'll never forget that UMBC beat Virginia as a 16 over a 1 [and I've forgotten what UMBC even stands for], but I'm not sure I'd feel the same if it's a beleaguered P5 in the 16 seed who manages to knock off a 1. That's just a garden variety upset, not a historic loss. And I don't think a 19 who beats a 14, probably playing the best game of their season against the best competition they've faced, has much of a chance of pulling it off twice in a row to beat a 3.
So yeah, we don't need 80 teams.
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The #4 seeds aren't THAT much better than the #5 seeds. Instead, this is a result of the way that the bracket is constructed. The top 11-12 seeds in each region are legitimate teams. The bottom 4-5 seeds in each region are "tallest midget" champions of weak leagues that have to be fit in somewhere based on the rules. Once you get past the top 11 or 12 seeds you are out of decent teams and just slotting in the crap.
To illustrate my point, here are the #10 through #14 seeds per Lunardi's latest sorted by their current NET rankings:
(https://i.imgur.com/u8jWnX1.png)
Note the large gap between #13 seed #80 per NET Vermont and #13 seed #96 per NET N. Texas. All the teams on this list down through Vermont might plausibly be tournament quality teams, from N. Texas down they aren't, at all.
This is why #13 - #16 seeds have such a terrible history. There are two decent #13 seeds (#73 Akron and #80 Vermont) then it gets really week. The rest of the #13's and all of the #14, #15, and #16 seeds are just really bad teams.
I think they should be eliminated with a conditional auto-bid rule (as laid out above) and if that isn't acceptable then they should have to play a decent team to get to the field of 64.
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Couldn’t one argue that instead of going to 80 and making some grand play in, we just tweak our perspective.
How about this, Medina, just treat it as a 38 team tournament or whatever. The top four or so seeds get byes that are “crappy” teams. And if your crappy bye rises up and knocks you out, that’s on you.
We have byes that fill TV time and a tighter top group of teams. Sounds AOK to me.
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Couldn’t one argue that instead of going to 80 and making some grand play in, we just tweak our perspective.
How about this, Medina, just treat it as a 38 team tournament or whatever. The top four or so seeds get byes that are “crappy” teams. And if your crappy bye rises up and knocks you out, that’s on you.
We have byes that fill TV time and a tighter top group of teams. Sounds AOK to me.
And it's provides excellent schadenfreude for the rest of us fans when it happens too. :72:
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I like the autobids, but can see why they would aggravate Medina's statistical brain.
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The NCAA tourney is perhaps the one thing in sports that doesn't need fixed
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What is the objective of a tournament in your opinion? (Make money is obviously a major one.)
I usually start with defining the objective.
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making even more money means expanding
64 teams seems to work wonderfully for money making
I agree with MaxSam, it needs nothing
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Yes, the motivation is making more money. The current system adds excitement for less heralded conferences and their playoffs.