The idea I guess is that you don’t go to the NIT only to lose to Robert Morris in the first round, which is its own kind of embarrassment. At least this way you’re “only” losing to Nebraska or something. That and you get to go to Vegas, which for some teams would be cool but for others may want to avoid having their student athletes in that environment.
The other question, of course, is about payouts, especially if you were going to be a lower NIT seed who wasn’t at least getting 1-3 games worth of home ticket sales out of it.
I mean, if the NCAA somehow loses the NCAA Tournament, do they even still exist in any meaningful fashion? Of course, they’d still be in charge of non-revenue sports. Which, honestly, is probably as it should be.
Those guys have not proven to be competent at anything beyond sitting there while the money poured in. Splitting them off from the money and making them do thing that’s supposed to be their actual job, regulating college athletics (and at which they might be competent? I genuinely have no idea how good a job they do of running field hockey, water polo, and wrestling), and putting someone else in charge of football and hoops might be a good idea.
My issue is it that the power conference NIT teams are typically coming off the end of a disappointing season, so the tournament benefits from having the energy of the mid-majors trying to take their shots against the bigger teams.
Eh, this is very off the cuff reaction, but people hate the NCAA for the same reason they hate their HR department – they exist to serve a purpose that is necessary but that nobody particularly likes. The NCAA is bad at enforcing its rules but the major reason they are bad at it is that it’s a really friggin hard job. But also necessary.
When Sankey eventually torpedoes the NCAA, he will need some group to do the same function, and everyone will hate that group, too.
And I wouldn’t discount how well the NCAA has done at running the tourney. I think it’s a mark of how well they’ve done, generally speaking, that we think it’s easy to do…
Oh, no question on the first paragraph. I get that everyone hates them mostly because they’re a convenient punching bag for almost everything. Given how sports journalism mostly goes, the only way you ever know the NCAA exists with regard to, say, diving, is if they make a decision that doesn’t go your way. There’s minimal scrutiny, but there’s also no serious money involved, and the year-end tournaments going fine is such a given that they’re probably fairly competent at running them.
On the other hand, I get that its a hard job, but I strongly disagree that the NCAA couldn’t be more effective at regulating the revenue sports. They lurch from crisis to crisis, leave the strategic planning entirely to the conferences, and seem to exist just to get pants’ed by anyone who doesn’t immediately self-flagellate after breaking a rule.
They regulate the non-revenue sports fine, and do a good job of running all the end-of-season tournaments, including the NCAA tournament. But from a financial standpoint, the only one that matters is the NCAA Hoops tournament. It feels like that tournament (along with trying to oversee regular season football and hoops) has left them a flaming dumpster of an organization despite being competent at 95% of what they do.
But what about the CBI?!?!? Isn’t that still a thing? How long before post season basketball is like post season football and there’s a tournament for everyone you just go down the ladder.
Including the CBI, don’t more hoops teams make the post-season than football teams?
That having been said, going to the Gasparilla Bowl or Bahamas Bowl or whatever THE bottom bowl is, is still clearly better than making the CBI and is probably better than the NIT.
I think you’re right that more hoops teams make the post season, not sure if it works out percentagewise. Currently just over 50% of all D1 teams make a bowl game.
I also agree that playing a Bowl game in Shreveport La. on Dec 14 is still light years ahead of playing on CBS sports.net in the CBI
At some point the most powerful conferences will decide to run their own postseason mens basketball tournament apart from the NCAA. This is just the 1st step. Only a matter of time.
Our highest-ranked team in the final AP poll in UVa history played in the Independence Bowl. (Had we not blown that Friday-after-Thanksgiving game vs. NC State, we probably would have been in the Fiesta that year. Sigh.)
I just want to note that the NCAA was created by the schools. It operates on their behalf. There’s also a ton it can’t do well because it seems to exist in a very narrow legal zone where what it can actually enforce is extremely limited and subject to legal challenge. It’s always a little funny to me seeing everybody shred it as if it were some organization that organically developed on its own or were created by Congress to antagonize college sports programs (not talking about your comment - just generally). I know that’s part of its central purpose - to take bullets for all of collegiate athletics - plus it is just bad at what it does at times, but it still sometimes seems a little ridiculous given the schools made it and it serves their collective interests.
The issue now seems to be the power conference teams don’t want to be tied to the non-power conference teams and don’t like that the NCAA reps all of them. But if they eventually really break off and do something insanely stupid like create a separate tournament only for them to replace the NCAA tournament, they would be morons.
The NCAA tournament is almost a perfect sporting event that makes everybody involved billions of dollars and is beloved by America. If they screw with that, people will probably blame the NCAA and say the schools had no choice, and I think they’ll be deeply wrong. It will be the fault of near-sighted greed by school ADs who can’t or won’t see the bigger picture. That’s half of what’s happening in college athletics right now - everybody using the NCAA to deflect blame from decisions and choices that are entirely about maxing out money for individual schools/protecting schools from legal liability.
Oh, sure. And yet, as you imply, here we are. The school ADs are always going “Golden eggs, you say? I wonder…”
I’m just noting that, while almost certainly a bad idea, restricting the NCAA to actually doing the things its good at AND keeping it away from the big money isn’t a bad idea. The NCAA Tournament is the only place its an issue.
TA had an article about how the NCAA tournament had to expand to appease the football schools after conference realignment. The power conferences are so big now that they all want more teams in the tournament and eventually they won’t want to share with the small schools, so they’ll break away from the NCAA and create their own postseason, just like they did for football.
Just as good or better than ours … and they’re a non major that won’t get many home and homes from majors.
BYU and St Mary’s - very solid
ACC school in Cal - solid
Big 10 team in Washington and or Xavier? Solid
ACC team in Stanford? Solid
Perennial Sweet 16 team in Gonzaga - Solid
Agree with @DavetheWave – St Mary’s and Zags could both be top 25 caliber teams (both in top 15 of Torvik). They are in the same Vegas event we were in last year, but with a worse field.
At the top end, it’s probably about equivalent to ours: A&M / Florida are also both good teams. Maybe Wisco, too.