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What The Hell Just Happened?

Filed Under: '09 - '10 Season, NCAA by KraverWP — Leave a comment
04/06/2010

I don’t remember watching an NCAA final and being as perplexed as I was yesterday.  Usually, I know who I’m rooting for.  If it’s one of those rare years when neither Penn nor Syracuse is in it (ahem), then there is probably some other team that I’ve taken a liking to, or, if not, then I’m probably just rooting for the underdog.

Butler was as great of an underdog story as I remember watching, but I wasn’t really rooting for the Bulldogs yesterday.  Nothing against them, but it was hard for me to get my head around the idea that the Butler Bulldogs would actually be the national champions.  Now that the game is over, my thoughts and feelings about the whole thing are no clearer than they were when the game started.  In no particular order, these are those thoughts and feelings:

1.  Appreciation.  That was a fantastic college basketball game, between two excellent teams.  Duke rolled out a solid Duke team, combining stars and role players.  And Butler is good.  Real good.  This is not a team lacking talent, that gets by with a system that compensates for its talent deficiency (ala Princeton).  Nor is it a team that relies on one star player (ala Weber State relying on Harold “the Show” Arceneaux) to slay a powerhouse.  This team has a number of weapons on offense, and plays stifling defense.

And, of course, I not only appreciated the teams themselves, but also the story.  One on hand, you have one of the most prestigious programs in the country.  On the other hand, you have the closest thing to a real-life Hickory High School from Hoosiers.

I love this game.

2.  Confusion.  Butler is a great story because it is able to achieve so much even though it has a basketball budget of less than $2 million, while some of the power programs have budgets of more than $10 million.  Kudos to Butler.

The flip side of that coin, though, is that tens of millions of dollars are being wasted.  If I was in charge of an enterprise with a budget of $10 million, and I just got showed up by a competitor with a budget of $2 million, I’d be pretty angry.  Basically, the system is not supposed to give Butler a national championship.  The fact that Butler came within one shot of winning means that the system is broken; lots of people in the system, with big budgets, are very bad at their jobs.

3.  Anger.  As a fan of the game, while I appreciate what Butler did, the realization that the system is broken makes me somewhat angry.  What are all of these programs with huge basketball budgets doing with that money?  The teams with the biggest budgets seem not to be recruiting the right guys.  The “experts” whose job it is to tell the casual fan what is going on in the game do not present the right stories.  (Though, to be fair, the people who rank the teams knew that Butler was good — why the Tournament Committee decided to make Butler a #5 seed is beyond me.)  The games that get featured on TV are not necessarily the ones with the best teams in them.

I don’t hold it against the “experts” that they didn’t predict Butler making the finals — Butler went on a great run in a single elimination tournament, and that’s part of the beauty of the game.  I do, though, blame them for not mentioning Gordon Hayward when they put together their pre-season All-American teams.  I do blame them for not putting Butler games on television.  I do blame them for not recruiting Shelvin Mack or Matt Howard as aggressively as they recruit McDonald’s All-Americans who are going to leave them after one year.

4.  Wonder.  Are mid-majors really poised to do just as well as the majors over the long term, or is this a one-shot deal?  Well, for Butler specifically, part of the answer is in the hands of Gordon Hayward.  If he comes back, joining Mack and Howard on next year’s team, these guys will be a force.  In the longer term, the answer is largely in the hands of Brad Stevens.  He’s got a good thing going there, and there’s no reason to think that he won’t be able to keep it going for a while.  But, if he jumps to a job at a bigger program, then we’ll probably look back on it as a one shot deal.

Not to put too much weight on his shoulders, but Stevens seems to have a lot of say in whether the mid-majors can really compete with the big boys.  Maybe I’m overstating it, but it seems to me that, if he turns down a job at a bigger program to stay at Butler, and he continues to succeed there, he’s basically sending the message that mid-majors can compete at the highest level.  But, if he uses his success simply as a stepping stone to go to a bigger program, it’s hard to see what would have to happen for mid-majors to really compete on the same level as the big boys over the long term.

5.  Enlightenment.  Because there is so much turnover in college hoops on a year-to-year basis, and because talented freshmen have such a big impact on the game, I think we sometimes go too far when we analyze each season in a vacuum.  Each of the teams in this year’s Final Four was in last year’s tournament; Michigan State had made the finals, and Duke had made the Sweet 16.

Hindsight is always 20-20, and I’m not saying that I now know something that, if I had known it three weeks ago, would have enabled me to predict what was going to happen in this year’s tournament.  I am saying, though, that next year, I’m going to pay much more attention to the teams that (i) played in this year’s tournament and (ii) return most of their starters, than I am going to pay to the teams that ESPN highlights on College GameDay.

Especially Butler.

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Don’t Expand The Tournament

Filed Under: NCAA by KraverWP — Leave a comment
04/04/2010

I wouldn’t be worth much as a basketblogger if I didn’t blog about the proposed expansion of the NCAA tournament.  Frankly, I don’t have much to say that hasn’t already been said. I think it’s a terrible idea, and just about everyone I’ve heard speak about it thinks it’s a terrible idea, too.   To the extent I have any thoughts about it that haven’t already been raised by other people, these are those thoughts:

1.   The top 8 seeds would get screwed.  Right now, the #1 seeds essentially have a bye in the first round.  And the #2 seeds win their first-round games about 95% of the time.  But, if the field is expanded, and the top 32 teams get byes, then, by the time the #1 and #2 seeds are playing their first game, they aren’t playing the likes of Arkansas-Pine Bluff and Eastern Tennessee State.  Instead, they are playing a team that already won a tournament game.  Thus, they’ll be playing tougher opponents.

In other words, the 64 teams that wind up in the round of 64 will come much closer to representing the 64 best teams in the country than the current field of 64 comes to representing the 64 best teams in the country (because the current field of 64 includes the champions of terrible conferences — teams that will get eliminated before the top 32 seeds take the court in the new format).  To me, this is a pretty big step back for the #1 and #2 seeds, and, therefore, the expansion would make the regular season less important (because it minimizes the award for getting a top seed).

2.   The whole idea of the expansion, as I understand it, is to make more money.  (I know that the NCAA has some half-hearted pitch about it being better for the players, but all of the commentators I have listened to say it’s about the money.)  I’m not going to grapple with whether that’s a legitimate motivation; that’s a different topic for a different day.  For now, I’ll assume that it’s legit.  My question is why the NCAA thinks that this expansion will actually make more money.

Right now, the first two days of the tournament are exciting because they include some close, quality matchups, like 8/9, 7/10, and 6/11 games.  As the tournament is currently constructed, an 8/9 game involves a team ranked between 29 and 32, and a team ranked between 33 and 36, of all the teams in the tournament.  The 7/10 game involves a team ranked between 25 and 28 and a team ranked between 37 and 40.

Well, the first two days of the expanded tournament will have no such matchups.  Any team ranked 1-8 will have a bye.  So the best teams playing on these first two days will be #9 seeds.  And they’ll be playing… wait for it… teams seeded #24 (in other words, teams ranked between 93 and 96 of all the tournament teams).  The “best” matchups will be games played between #16 and #17 seeds.

Ummm… why the hell does the NCAA assume that people will be excited to watch these games?  Under the current system, people take extended lunches, or leave early from work — or even take the whole two days off from work — to watch the games.  Does the NCAA think that people are going to do that to watch a 9 v 24 game?  A 16 v 17 game?

More importantly, why does the NCAA assume that people will buy tickets to go to those games?  When I watch the games now, I’m amazed at how many empty seats there are.  Is there any reason to think that the seats will sell better for the expanded tournament?

3.  If the idea here is simply to have more tournament games, under the thinking that tournament games bring in money and more tournament games will bring in more money, then why not go to a double-elimination tournament?  The logistics would be somewhat difficult, but I don’t see why the NCAA couldn’t do away with conference tournaments, so the NCAA tournament starts a week earlier. That would allow for there to be a loser’s bracket without having the tournament last much longer into April than it already does.

Perhaps it sounds like a wild idea to move away from the single-elimination format, but, once you’re moving away from the current system simply to bring in more money, I think that a double-elimination tournament is no less crazy than expanding the field to 96.

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