Conference tournaments

[thecat]

I realize this topic is a dead horse that's been beaten before, but it is that time of year so.....
The past three months have been played just for seeding for the conference tournament and I am not fine with that. Conferences such as the MAC and so many others that usually just get one team in the NCAA tourney choose their automatic qualifier with a 3 day playoff. Doesn't anyone else find this ridiculous? I am not naive, I know that conference tournaments were devised just for revenue's sake. But I can't imagine that mid-major leagues make that much profit from their tournaments. The big-time conferences( Big Ten, ACC, etc,) should just play a few more regular season games so that there is a complete round robin, and forget the conference tournaments. Those tournaments prove very little except wearing out your team. When does a team ever play 3 games in 3 days? Only in conference tournaments. I wonder how many teams have won their conference tournament and went on to win the NCAA championship? That's 9 straight wins, a tough task.
Leagues that only get one team into the NCAA's should select their automatic qualifier based on the regular season. The regular season champ could be exempt from the conf. tourney and let the others fight it out. If the NCAA selection committee thinks that winner is worthy, so be it. I just get fed up with playing 3-4 months of exhibition games.
One last thing. Who does the sporting public recognize as a conference champion? The team that proved it over 3 months or the team that got hot for 3 days? I've heard coaches and players say it both ways. For example, was Ball State the MAC champs last year or just the NCAA qualifier?

[BigGibber]

The past three months have been played just for seeding for the conference tournament and I am not fine with that.

If the MAC NCAA bid went the the regular season champion would that mean that the past 3 months were played just to determine the NCAA bid? Neither premise is correct. The regular season stands on it's own, actually, each game stands on it's own. 1600 fans a game don't go to Anderson arena to see if we'll make it to the NCAA's. They go to watch dedicated young ladies compete, to cheer every 3-pointer, cheer every charge taken, every defensive stand that eats up the shot clock, to high five the fan next to them, to yell "SU" every time Sue yells "BG" and much, much more. I would argue that every play stands on it's own. To suggest the the past 3 months were played "just for" anything diminishes what these ladies have sacrificed.

Is it a shame when BG is the regular season champ and one loss costs them a chance at the big dance? Absolutely. Does it hurt, is it unfair? You bet. But it doesn't take anything away from the fact that they are MAC regular season Champions, now for 6 years in a row.

Just as the regular season stands on it's own, the tournament season stands on it's own. With the exception of the Ivy League, I believe every conference has a league tournament to determine NCAA automatic bids and in most every league, all teams participate in the league tourney regardless of record. That means virtually every team in the country has a chance at redemption. Personally, I love that.

If losing in the Mac Tourney didn't hurt so much it wouldn't feel so good to win it.

[VDub26Falcon]

Bruce, I have to disagree with you completely. I would have to say that NCAA Basketball season is the most pointless of all sports seasons. Do I enjoy it? Hell yes! But when you have a team (BG) that wins it's conference championship, outright, for six years in a row, and doesn't have six straight NCAA Tourney appearances, how does that make the regular season look? All the regular season does is seed the tournament. Think about it. If, somehow, the Bulls get all the way to the MAC Championship game and beat our Falcons in it, it is likely that BG will be heading to the NIT. How is that fair? I think you have to give the automatic bid to the Regular Season champion and then the committee can decide if the tourney champ is good enough to go to the NCAA's as well, assuming it's not the same team. Take the Men's Tar Heels for another example. I would LOVE if they made a run and won the ACC Tourney but they don't deserve to take an NCAA spot from another ACC team. It's just not right. But, it will never change and the horse is more than dead.

[BigGibber]

Bruce, I have to disagree with you completely. I would have to say that NCAA Basketball season is the most pointless of all sports seasons. Do I enjoy it? Hell yes!

I don't understand how you can enjoy something that much and still feel it's pointless. Could you look any one of those ladies in the eye and say that your MAC Championship was pointless because you lost one game. I just refuse to make the NCAA Bid the be all and end all of collegiate basketball. Coach Miller said it best in his post game press conference after the UT game, "We want to win Championships, it's never about one game". Winning game in and game out over the course of a year (much less 6 years) is far more difficult than winning 3 games in a row in Cleveland and it becomes exponentially more difficult every time we repeat. Six years in a row. Pointless?

[VDub26Falcon]

In regards to getting to the NCAA tournament, the regular season is pointless. The SIX straight championships are not.

[Class of 61]

Bruce, I have to disagree with you completely. I would have to say that NCAA Basketball season is the most pointless of all sports seasons. Do I enjoy it? Hell yes! But when you have a team (BG) that wins it's conference championship, outright, for six years in a row, and doesn't have six straight NCAA Tourney appearances, how does that make the regular season look? All the regular season does is seed the tournament. Think about it. If, somehow, the Bulls get all the way to the MAC Championship game and beat our Falcons in it, it is likely that BG will be heading to the NIT. How is that fair? I think you have to give the automatic bid to the Regular Season champion and then the committee can decide if the tourney champ is good enough to go to the NCAA's as well, assuming it's not the same team. Take the Men's Tar Heels for another example. I would LOVE if they made a run and won the ACC Tourney but they don't deserve to take an NCAA spot from another ACC team. It's just not right. But, it will never change and the horse is more than dead.

Vdub,
FWIW, unless the Cat has the same 1st name as my brother from Texas i.e. "Texcat" on this forum...you may be talking with the wrong guy.

[VDub26Falcon]

He has "Bruce" in the signature of his posts. That's why I assume his name is Bruce.

[bgsufalcon24]

Bruce, I have to disagree with you completely. I would have to say that NCAA Basketball season is the most pointless of all sports seasons. Do I enjoy it? Hell yes!

Could you look any one of those ladies in the eye and say that your MAC Championship was pointless because you lost one game?

I think pointless might be too strong a word, but the concept is on target. I think in all honesty, another regular season MAC championship is great. That being said if we were to lose in Cleveland next week, I think the ladies would tell you that they did not achieve their ultimate goal for this season, which was and is to reach the NCAA tournament. Remember, this current class of Pontius, Uhl, Prochaska, et al, has never made it to the big dance, yet they've already won the conference regular season twice in prior years. Certainly I don't know any of them personally and can't speak for them, but it would seem as though the NCAA bid would be much bigger at this point.

Ask yourself this question. Who had the best season of any MAC team last year, us or Ball State? If your answer is BG, you're either a complete and utter homer, or totally delusional.

[vwfalcon]

How do you figure we didn't have the best season in the league last year? We won the conference outright... had a 20+ game winning streak... Ball State barely squeaked by us last year in the championship game... and yet we would be considered delusional or a homer? We finished 29-5 with our regular season record being 26-3 and you somehow want to say that we didn't have a good year just because Ball State beat a Tennessee team that was over-hyped and under achieved all season last year? You really think that we couldn't have had the same result that they did? Their offense ran through Portia Green last year in that game and Tracy Pontius is on the exact same level as her.

As far as this year's conference tournament, I was looking at Bracketology by Charlie Creme and noticed that we are slated to be a 13 seed in the same region as Vanderbilt, a team we beat... at their place... by the way... who is slated to be a 6 seed.

It's pretty much win three straight in the Q or play in the WNIT again which is a shame. How many more years do we need to win the conference before we get a little bit of respect?

[BGFalconfromCincy]

How many more years do we need to win the conference before we get a little bit of respect?

but when you are in a league like the league we are in you also have to have a strong OOC resume as well, we had 5 big time OOC games this season that would have helped our resume for an at-large bid greatly, and we went 1-4 in those games, and that lost at Central didn't help the cause either

[bgsufalcon24]

How do you figure we didn't have the best season in the league last year? We won the conference outright... had a 20+ game winning streak... Ball State barely squeaked by us last year in the championship game... and yet we would be considered delusional or a homer? We finished 29-5 with our regular season record being 26-3 and you somehow want to say that we didn't have a good year just because Ball State beat a Tennessee team that was over-hyped and under achieved all season last year? You really think that we couldn't have had the same result that they did? Their offense ran through Portia Green last year in that game and Tracy Pontius is on the exact same level as her.

As far as this year's conference tournament, I was looking at Bracketology by Charlie Creme and noticed that we are slated to be a 13 seed in the same region as Vanderbilt, a team we beat... at their place... by the way... who is slated to be a 6 seed.

It's pretty much win three straight in the Q or play in the WNIT again which is a shame. How many more years do we need to win the conference before we get a little bit of respect?

Alright, first of all, I never said we didn't have a good year last year. That would be ridiculous seeing as we won 26 games in the regular season. All I said was that Ball State's year was better. They had a better year because they made the NCAA tournament and we didn't. Period. And, they beat TENNESSEE in the first round. Exclamation point! To say that we could have and would have beaten Tennessee as well (which I don't necessarily disagree with) is simply sour grapes. We should have made the field last year as an at-large team, but we didn't, so ultimately we're not in a position to say, "hey if we would have made it we would've done abc or beaten team xyz". Ball State actually pulled it off, and caused ripples throughout the women's basketball world by doing so.

When you think about it, what they accomplished was similar to what we accomplished in 2007, becoming the first mid-american conference team to reach the women's sweet 16. The whole stinking fanbase of women's basketball knew who BGSU was after we beat Vanderbilt, and we were picking up fans from all corners of the country. That's what's so great about the NCAA tournament, in that it allows your program to transcend it's boundaries and pull in fans that may not have even heard of your school before. Ball State did that last year, just as we had in 2007, and Kent State and Miami had done in previous years on the men's side. I could make the argument that the Golden Flashes are pretty well respected nationally still because of that run they had in 2002.

MAC regular season titles are all fine and dandy, so are the wins, but are they better than making the NCAA tournament and beating a leviathan of the sport? Not a chance.

For sake of comparison, Bowling Green was 29-5 in 2009, and Ball State was 26-9. We had a regular season title, they had a tournament title. So basically your whole argument comes down to a 3 game difference in the regular season versus going to NCAA's and winning. That's a questionable argument at best.

[vwfalcon]

Ball State got hot at the right time... We had a better season... take your doom and gloom Bull s**t somewhere else... over the past couple of days I've seen more and more of your posts being so negative... They had a better year because they got hot in the MAC tourney and beat as I said before an over-hyped and overrated Tennessee team last year that only got that high of a seed because of their name... not their resume last year... We were a better team than Ball State... you won't convince me otherwise because we beat them by 9 in regular season and they got us by 4 in the final... We had one conference loss they had two... We had a better record and yet because of one game you say they had a better season?

that would be like saying Ball States football team lost 6 games but one of their 6 wins was against Boise State and We won 10 games but didn't beat Boise so they we had a better season... get real.

Call me delusional again... please...

[bgsufalcon24]

that would be like saying Ball States football team lost 6 games but one of their 6 wins was against Boise State and We won 10 games but didn't beat Boise so they we had a better season... get real.

Call me delusional again... please...

Alright, let's take this example and run with it. Let's say Ball State goes 6-6 in football and Bowling Green goes 10-2. Let's say even that Bowling Green beats Ball State during the year as one of those 10 wins. In this example, Ball State has a win over Boise State, and Bowling Green doesn't have any wins of that quality.

In this example, Bowling Green clearly has the better year...but there's some information you left out.

To make this a truly relevant example, let's say Ball State wins the West Division at 5-3 via tiebreaker, and meets Bowling Green, who went 8-0 and rolled through the East Division. Ball State then goes on to pull the upset and win the MAC Championship Game, which is the football equivalent of the MAC basketball tourney title.

If that were to occur, I'm sorry, Ball State had the better year. 7-6 vs 10-3, it doesn't matter, because they have the trophy. Just about anybody on this message board would trade 3 regular season wins for a MAC Championship.

In fact, you don't have to examine this too deeply, because such an example played out in 2008. Ball State was indomitable in the regular season, going 12-0. They were favored to destroy a Buffalo team that barely snuck by Akron and Bowling Green in overtime to win the East Division at 5-3. Buffalo shouldn't have even been on the same field as Ball State according to the paper. But they won the game and won the trophy. Now maybe in this case you might stick with Ball State because they actually went unbeaten in the regular season and garnered a ton of national publicity in the process, but again, I don't think anybody in Buffalo would trade their MAC Championship for that.

As for me being negative, please do take a look at the hockey forum. We got smoked by Nebraska Omaha last weekend and what did I post? I said that Coach Williams has a good thing going and that the program looks like it's headed in the right direction. Check the men's basketball forum. Did I have anything bad to say about the men's team losing in the first round of the MAC tournament for the fourth time in five years? No. I could have easily piled on those two teams for their poor showings. You're going to the well here because of my vast negativity in the past, but you won't find much water to pour in your bucket this time.

I suppose if you're really grasping for anything, I did mention that I'm a bit leery of how our women's team plays when the pressure is on, but I don't think I'm alone there. Our performances down the stretch against Marist, Hartford, Central Michigan, and others this season wasn't exactly stellar. And that's not so much being negative as it is bringing up a relevant point. We lack killer instinct.

We can continue this little charade if you wish, but with the tournament starting tomorrow, I'd rather get down to business. BEAT J CREW U!!!

[bgsu93]

I realize that BGSU fans become upset when the team is not selected for the NCAA Tournament for at Large Bid.
I have done some research on the NCAA WEB Page concerning Seeding and Selecting teams for the Tournament. The reading is interesting, but can be boring. But I have posted below a short section of the report for everyone to Read as well as the whole report.

Short version: The Rating Percentage Index (RPI) was created in 1981 to provide supplemental data for the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee in its evaluation of teams for at-large selection and seeding of the championship bracket. The Division I Women’s Basketball Committee adopted the RPI in 1984.
The RPI is intended to be used as one of many valuable resources provided to the committee in the selection, seeding and bracketing process. It never should be considered anything but an additional evaluation tool. No computer program that is based on pure numbers can take into account subjective concepts (e.g., how well a team is playing down the stretch, what the loss or return or a top player means to a team or how emotional a specific conference game may be).
Several independent elements are combined to produce the RPI. These elements are part of the statistical information that can be utilized by each member in an objective manner.
Each committee member independently evaluates a vast pool of information available during the process to develop individual preferences. It is these opinions, developed after many hours of personal observations (e.g., games watched), review of regional rankings submitted by coaches, discussion with coaches, directors of athletics senior woman administrators, commissioners and review and comparison of objective data that dictate how each individual ultimately will vote on all issues related to the selection, seeding and bracketing process.
While the various elements of the RPI are important in the evaluation process, the tournament bracket each year is based on the subjectivity of each individual committee member to select the best at-large teams available and to create a nationally-balanced championship.

The Link to long version is http://www.ncaa.org/wps/wcm/connect/7a2 ... -2-9-09.pd