To the genius who created conference tournaments: THANK YOU!
As the college baseball season winds down as conference tournaments begin and end, I am left shaking my head at what these tournaments do to the eventual field of 64 that make the NCAA Tournament.
As the NCAA tournament is set up currently, 30 teams receive automatic bids while 34 wait for the selection committee to hopefully place them as an at-large bid. The 30 auto bids are given to conference champions.
Due to conference tournaments it is not the regular season champion that receives this bid, unless you are in a conference like the Pac-10 or Big West, neither of which holds a conference tournament. This argument was all over ESPN when we prepared for March Madness, and sorry basketball fans but in baseball the conference tournament is a whole lot different.
In baseball (and for the most part softball) teams fight through the longest season in college sports, only to have their success or lack there of thrown out the window. True a team like St. John’s who is ranked in the top 25 nationally and was knocked out in two games during the Big East tourney, will receive an at-large bid, other schools from small conferences do not receive that benefit. The conference tournaments allow for teams with losing records to qualify for the NCAA tournament and likely become an automatic win for a team like Florida State or Stanford.
Having just played a full weekend series in conference, teams have likely used their top starting pitchers and possibly exhausted their bullpens. This leaves weekday starters and a depleted bullpen for the conference tournaments starting a day or two after game three of the weekend set. It is in that situation where a higher seed is upset by a low seed when the pitching match-up begins to even out.
Losing in the first round of their conference tournaments are many top 25 teams including last years National Championship-runner up North Carolina and perennial Omaha visitor Rice.
In a Mountain West Conference game, No. 5 Utah led by former-Beaver pitcher Brian Budrow, knocked off No. 4 BYU 9-3, after a complete game 10-strikeout gem by Budrow. The very next day BYU was knocked out of the tournament and Utah was spanked 8-2 by No. 2 New Mexico.
The tournament setting has provided a ton of upsets in the early goings, especially in the double elimination settings. Conferences like the ACC and Big XII operate in a round robin fashion, which while allowing for upsets allows for the higher seeds to come back and work into the championship.
A few conferences even run a three game series between the top two squads, case in point the WCC match-up of San Diego and Pepperdine. In some instances this is great wait until the next weekend and match-up the best arms on each team before doing battle. In the lowly Ivy League however, Columbia knocked off regular season champions Dartmouth in three games, despite Columbia’s 22-25 losing record.
The tournament that makes me cringe the most as I write is that of the Southwestern Athletic Conference, the SWAC. Out of the tournament and probably out of chances for the NCAA tournament are Jackson State, Alcorn State and Southern, along with their winning percentages of .627, .644 and .609 respectively. If three teams with winning percentages well above .500 cannot make the tournament then who does? The Texas Southern Tigers. The lowly Tigers won only seven conference games and ended the year 16-32 overall. Texas Southern played well at the right time however winning six straight at the end of the year including the SWAC tournament. Oh and yes Beaver fans, they may have even lowered Oregon State’s chances at making the field of 64.
Gone should be the conference tournaments, which negate the existence of a regular season in the first place and put insane amounts of pull on that ridiculous stat known as RPI. What the NCAA should do instead is give the bid out to the conference champion of the regular season, Arizona State got theirs and the Pac-10 will probably get four more teams at least into the post-season.
With conference tournaments the fact that a top 25 ranked St. John’s went 41-14 doesn’t mean anything except now there are only 33 at-large bids up for grabs. A top-five Rice Owls squad who only lost three games in Conference USA, while knocking off perennial powerhouses from the Big XII in non-conference, have been eliminated from the conference tournament and reducing the at-large bids to 32.
I understand that there is revenue in the conference tournaments (in some cases). Michigan – who had to play a Super Regional in Corvallis last year due to their stadium not being ready for play – is hosting the Big Ten tourney and receiving money, and fans.
On the flipside of course you have the WAC tournament in which six of the seven squads in the conference go to a school to play a tourney. So why is this a problem? Because the host this year is Louisiana Tech, they did not qualify for the conference tournament, which is being played at the schools Love Field. I wonder what it would be like to watch No. 1 Fresno State and No. 2 Hawaii meet up in the championship game, in front of 100 people.
Something needs to be done with the postseason arrangement as it stands around the country. Regardless of what the NCAA does, I do not ask but I beg them to do me two favors. Favor One: Please remain at Rosenblatt Stadium. Anyone who has not been, go. It is a blast and as I write this I am wearing my bright orange “Save the Blatt” shirt. Favor Two: Put Dallas Baptist into the tournament. Since 1992 no NCAA Independent team has qualified for the NCAA Tournament (this does not include the Miami Hurricanes who were Independent for quite some time). Cal State Northridge accomplished the feat in 1992, this year Dallas Baptist deserves it as the Patriots went 37-17 in a tough to set up independent schedule, which included very few visitors to Frisco, Tex.
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