Great story by Mike Kern in this morning's Daily News about how the Ivy League is once again thinking about having a post-season conference tournament in basketball to determine the winner of its automatic bid. The athletic directors of the eight Ivy schools will meet tomorrow to discuss this and whatever else sports-related is on their minds.
No one asked me (yet), but I'm against it. I am now and I have been for a while and I am pretty sure I will be for a long time. And not just for the Ivy League.
Simply put, I don't think any conference should give its automatic bid to its tournament champion. The best team in each conference deserves the automatic bid, and that team is the one with the best record in regular season conference play. That means every conference from the ACC to the Big East to the Patriot League to the Sun Belt. Easy enough.
It's especially true for the non-BCS conferences, though. If you have a team that's better-than-good but maybe not good enough to be sure of an at-large bid, you want that team in the Tournament. That team has a better chance at a high seed and thus a chance to win a game and deliver the conference a big bag of cash. I'm thinking of Bucknell in the Patriot League over the last two years. The Bison got a 9-seed in last year's tournament but a team that had knocked it off would have been a 16-seed.
Air Force in the Mountain West and Nevada in the WAC are other good examples of very good teams in one-bid conferences where the other teams have trailed well behind in recent years.
Now I'm sure the BCS conference teams, especially those in the ACC and Big East, would complain loudly about how that would devalue their tradition-laden, big-money, national-TV-for-every-game tournaments. But even if it's close to impossible for the worst team in those conferences to knock off four teams in four days because the top teams are so good, it's not completely impossible. And I'm sure those conferences would hate nothing more than if that happened in a (relative) off year when they weren't guaranteed five or six bids each.
Remember, it wasn't so long ago that the Big Ten and Pac-10 didn't have conference tournaments, and they didn't really suffer for it. If anything, their regular seasons were more valuable, and those lasted four months instead of four days. Ivy League regular-season games have more value in them than regular-season games in any other conference because of the lack of a tournament.
It might be a speck of dust on the national conscience relative to the major conferences, but Penn-Princeton has a far bigger effect on the Tournament field (most years, at least) than Rutgers-Seton Hall or Northwestern-Minnesota.
Heck, Duke-Carolina doesn't really affect the tournament field either most years, because both teams are probably going to go (unless Matt Doherty is coaching Carolina). People watch that game because it's a great rivalry and the teams are really good, but they don't watch because a Tournament berth is on the line.
Penn AD Steve Bilsky makes a lot of very good points about scheduling an Ivy tournament around classes, midterms, and other logistical problems. But that's not the real reason to scrap the idea. Same goes for figuring out where to hold the thing. The real reason to not have a tournament is that it makes the other teams in the conference have teams and programs that are good enough to genuinely merit winning the title and going to the NCAA Tournament. As Bilsky said in the paper, Penn and Princeton have done the work and been rewarded, and the other teams have not:
"If, over the last 40 years, we'd won 10 [titles], Princeton won 10 and every other team split the other 20, so everyone had a taste of it, I don't think we'd be having this discussion. I kind of sense that [some believe] the only way to break this roadblock is to do something different. I don't think that's a reason to do it at all."
Say what you will about the Ivy League not changing much over time, but on this count I think they've got it right.
