Conference tournament season is upon us and it is the best part of the basketball season. Oh, the NCAA tournament is pretty cool, too. It\u2019s like when somebody says so-and-so is a \u201cgreat coach, better person\u201d. If you wanted to be a jerk you could rephrase that to say \u201creally fantastic person, worse coach\u201d. What I\u2019m saying is that the NCAA tournament is great, but the conference tournaments are better. Here’s why.<\/p>\n
1) It\u2019s possible to win.<\/strong> The NCAA tournament is like powerball for most of America\u2019s 351 teams. You can’t win if you don\u2019t play, but the chance of you seeing a UFO on your way to buying a ticket is greater than your chance of winning. <\/p>\n Only one team can win the NCAA tournament and there have only been Conference tournaments aren\u2019t exactly easy to win – there are plenty of teams that have never won one – but they are easier<\/em> by virtue of there being 32 winners each season. And since a team usually has to win just three or four games for a title, the possibility of winning on is open to so many more teams. <\/p>\n Not everybody has a chance, mind you. (Sorry, Bradley.) But you can count on a team winning a title this week that had somewhere south of a 2% chance going into its tournament. <\/p>\n 2) People aren\u2019t involved in the bracketing process.<\/strong> I\u2019m not sure how it came to be but it\u2019s somehow accepted, even preferred, in college athletics that people should determine who gets into the postseason tournament. In professional sports, standings determine one\u2019s postseason fate. And likewise at the high school level, standings generally rule, although there are some states that employ power ratings to round out the postseason field. <\/p>\n But to my knowledge, there isn\u2019t another team sports organization that has a group of people huddled in a conference room over a weekend figuring out who should get a shot to win the organization\u2019s championship. That puts many teams in an awkward spot of not knowing what they have to do to get a bid. <\/p>\n But in conference tournaments, the standings rule. That\u2019s not to say there aren\u2019t some quirks in the process. An arbitrary tiebreaker is forcing Murray State to win two additional games in the OVC tournament. But at least everyone knows the rules ahead of time. <\/p>\n 3) It brings people together.<\/strong> Conference tournaments also provide a predetermined meeting place for fans of the conference\u2019s teams. (At least for the tournaments that are played at a predetermined site.) In the NCAA tournament, you don\u2019t know where your team will be playing until just a few days before they play there which complicates making travel plans. At the conference level you have months to make plans to see your team play. <\/p>\n The detractors of the conference tournament say it takes away from the meaning of the regular season. And it\u2019s true that a single-elimination tournament isn\u2019t as good as a round-robin schedule to determine the best team. But the difference is slight<\/a>. No doubt, a tournament can be fluky. But an 18-game regular season isn\u2019t a perfect way to crown the best team, either. It can be fluky, too. (The 2014 WAC<\/a>h says hello.)<\/p>\n And also, we aren\u2019t running a science experiment here. If you think it\u2019s so important to identify each conference\u2019s best team, surely you must feel similarly about determining the nation\u2019s best team. That\u2019s way more important! But yet nobody is advocating for going to seven-game series in the NCAA tournament because that wouldn\u2019t be fun at all.<\/p>\nten<\/strike> 11 different winners over the past 20 seasons. That leaves 341<\/strike> 340 teams without much hope. Even in a season with quite a bit of parity at the top, there\u2019s still a decent chance that the champ this season will come from that pool of ten<\/strike> 11 teams – and one of them isn\u2019t even eligible for the tournament.<\/p>\n