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Honestly, from a competition perspective, I can not think of one good reason to have conference tournaments. The teams have 3 months to sort out who the best teams are, why give them a "second chance" Mid-major conferences that typically only get one team to the big NCAA tourney should want to send their best representative, not a team that got "hot" and or lucky on the 3 day weekend, Yea, I know, March madness, the excitement of tournament time and all that; but I don't buy. My automatic qualifier would be the team that proved it against all-comers over the long grind of a regular season schedule. These "shammockerys" may bring in some additional revenue and I understand that's crucial for the league, but it is no way to determine who gets a ticket to the big dance.

Ideally, the MAC regular season winner would get an at-large with the tourney winner getting the auto birth (should they be different.) It's a good idea to find out who the second best team in the conference - and a tourney could do that.

I think the MAC will get to a two bid especially if the BG program continues to raise the bar for the rest of the conference.

For the MAC money would be the only reason to have a conference tournament.

Unless the regular season champion gets an automatic bid the conference can be a bad idea. One .500 team getting hot can represent the MAC. That would be ugly.

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I feel that that the Conf Champ and Tourney Champ should get a bid... If one team wins both then that opens up more at large... Or then the runner up of either Conf or tourney should get in...

The NIT is the last resort for teams..

if you do that your lible to have an odd amount of teams in the tournament and your pool likely jumps from 64/65 to somewhere in the neighborhood of 75-80 teams. How would you like to do an 80 team bracket?

"How would you like to do an 80 team bracket?"

Great question. An even better one is how did we get to a 64/65 team bracket to begin with? I mean who pulled that number out of their AZZ?

If we are attempting to find the best team in the country, why not open the tournament up to more teams? Or shrink it down? What if each DIV I conference could only send 1 team to the tournament and one team to the NIT with the champions of the two tournaments playing each other for the national championship? Hmmmm.

--MH

michhiker28 wrote:Great question. An even better one is how did we get to a 64/65 team bracket to begin with? I mean who pulled that number out of their AZZ?

64 is easy, it's a next step up to an even number of rounds with everyone playing the same number of games.

The 65 is odd... Why not make it 68 and have play-in games for each region?

And really, with some byes, one more weekend could include all of Division 1.