Prelude to the Big Dance

Once upon a time, when the PAC-10 was the PAC-8 and the Big 12 was the Big 8 and the Big Ten was comprised of precisely 10 schools, the ACC post-season conference tournament was just a curious and quirky anomaly. Make no mistake about it, the fans up and down Tobacco Road revered the quaint traditions, the fierce competition and the raucous celebrations surrounding their unique tournament. The ACC didn't turn up its nose at the revenues either.

For decades, the ACC (and a couple of other conferences) were allowed to be different and colorful without wholesale imitation. The prevailing wisdom of the day was that an arduous, round-robin, home-and-home regular season schedule was a better way to identify the strongest team in a conference. After all, any team might win three consecutive games against random competition, but only a very good team could compile a superior record over the course of a long, but fair, conference schedule.

The ACC scoffed at that wisdom and used the regular season standings for nothing more than seeding teams in their tournament brackets. They threw caution to the wind and played winner-take-all: the tournament champion was the conference champion and the conference champion received the single conference bid to the NCAA tournament.

While other conferences saw the inherent risk in exposing their best team to a weekend of danger that could end in tragic upset and the loss of a tournament bid, the ACC blithely forced its teams to submit to a deadly game of Russian roulette as a prelude to the Big Dance. In order for an ACC team to win the National Championship, it had to survive two single-elimination tournaments, back-to-back. Only occasionally were ACC teams able to accomplish that feat and the conventional wisdom was that the ACC tournament took too much out of the teams to perform well at the national level, or maybe ACC champions simply believed they had already won the big prize.

Either way, the 1974 tournaments signaled the end of that bygone era and its differentiated traditions. That year, Maryland and NC State, two of the three highest rated teams in the land, collided in the ACC tournament championship game. After two overtime sessions, NC State prevailed by a margin of just two points. Clearly the teams were evenly matched, but only NC State proceeded to the NCAA tournament. In the national semi-finals, NC State ran into top-rated UCLA, a team riding an incredible streak of seven consecutive championships. NC State beat the Bruins in overtime and went on to win an anti-climatic title game, leaving fans everywhere wondering what would have happened had NC State needed to beat Maryland again in the national championship game.

Thinking it was fixing one problem, the NCAA promptly created another problem. The NCAA tournament field was expanded and multiple teams from the same conference were allowed into the Big Dance. That guaranteed that the very best teams in the country would compete for the national championship, irrespective of their conference affiliation or the number of other good teams in their conference. Since every deserving team could be invited to the Big Dance, the purpose for holding a tournament to decide which team should receive an automatic conference bid was eliminated forever, right?

Wrong. Unaccountably, the dynamics worked in the opposite direction. Once the NCAA removed the risk that an SEC or Big Ten or PAC-10 regular season champion could be left on the sidelines at the Big Dance, all the lemmings began herding along behind the ACC, copying what can't be reproduced. Today virtually all conferences stage post-season tournaments and the results are mixed at best.

First of all, conference tournaments have the potential to water-down the NCAA field. In non-major conferences, where the regular season champion will get invited to the NCAA tournament only if it wins the conference tournament, we often lose the one deserving team in the conference to upset. We lost Boston University yesterday when Stoneybrook pulled an unlikely upset, but this didn't turn into a Cinderella story for Stoneybrook, either, as they were ousted by Maine today.

In major conferences, where regular season champions, plus one or two or three more teams, are at no risk of being left out of the Big Dance, we frequently get desultory performances in the conference tournaments. Then the fans are at risk of a second division team winning it all and subtracting from the field one other team deserving of an at-large bid. This may make the art of bracketology more interesting, but it doesn't promote the formation of the strongest possible tournament field.

Secondly, conference tournaments trivialize regular season accomplishments. It is an interesting commentary on our modern culture that performance in the "big game" is more important than consistently good performance over the long haul. Last year Wisconsin won the regular season Big Ten title outright. Illinois, which won the conference tournament, received a No. 4 seed in the NCAA tournament, while Wisconsin received a No. 5 seed. Wisconsin made it to the Sweet Sixteen, Illinois did not.

Logically, the best team in a conference is the one that most successfully runs the gauntlet of the regular season schedule. Logically it is that team that should be named the conference champion and, therefore, should be awarded the conference's automatic bid to the Big Dance.

If that rule were in effect, how many conferences would continue to stage conference tournaments? Actually, the answer still might be, all of them. Fans are enamored with the idea that their team can go to the Big Dance no matter how dismal their season. But, do we really want to reward a 9-19 team for a lackluster season just because they happen to win a couple of specific games at the end of the season? Do we want a Stoneybrook giving a St. Joe's or a Stanford a free first-round pass in the tournament?

Then there's the issue of money. Conference tournaments make it, and conferences and host cities want it. Conference tournaments are the basketball equivalent of the business convention or trade show. They are good for the economy, which conveys a power out of all proportion to their value in determining the national champion.

As a result, we will never return to the halcyon days of a uniquely risky and wonderfully colorful approach to selecting a conference champion and an NCAA tournament representative. That is a sad loss for fans and a weekend party is an insufficient payment in return.