No one is being punished. They have 18-20 opportunities to show they are worthy of competing for a national title. Most teams in the country would kill for even 5 of those chances. If a P6 team goes 8-10 or 9-11 it’s clear evidence they don’t deserve a title shot.
Tbh with how bad the bubble has been the last 5 years no one in any league anywhere is being ‘punished’ by not making the tournament. We already let in mediocre teams with resumes that didn’t accomplish anything
They are being held to a different standard than other teams.
No. Every team has the same standard. Win and earn a title shot. Same as every other sport. You don’t get a title shot just for being in proximity of good teams. 9-9 or 10-10 is also a really low bar
Every team should have the same standard. We agree on that. If we set a rule that “you must have a winning record in your conference,” every team would not have the same standard, because the conferences are not equal measuring sticks.
We’re not talking about bubble teams, either. TCU and Iowa State are forecast as 5 and 6 seeds. Your rule would kick them out in favor of someone who comes in for the First Four.
Every team already doesn’t have the same standard. But mediocrity in proximity to greatness is rewarded more than greatness in proximity to mediocrity by allowing losing teams in. I’d like to see the opposite if we can’t condense the tournament
I’d like to see the best teams get in. I don’t want to replace a 5-seed quality team with an 11-seed quality team.
I want to see the most deserving get in. West Virginia has already proven 18 times they aren’t as good as Baylor, Kansas, or Texas. Why do they deserve a 19th shot to prove it yet again? The answer is because CBS and Turner need 68 teams not because they actually deserve it.
I realize I am now getting way away from practically talking about how things work and getting into a ‘what the tournament should be’ discussion. I just hate seeing year long mediocrity rewarded with a chance at a title. Not how it works in other sports and wish we could get away from it in CBB
To me it just depends on the competitiveness of the team. WVU does not have a great record, but they have been consistently competitive in the Big 12 (one bad blow out to Texas not withstanding). The few times I have seen them they look like a tournament team to me. That said I think the Big 12 is a different story than the Big 10. I really do not get the love for the Big 10 teams like Wiscy and Penn St.
Heck I’d go a step further and bar any team that didn’t have at least a 3 game win streak from at large selection. They’ve already proven they have no chance at being a national champion. Give someone who hasn’t already proven that a chance
I don’t want WVa out for a BIG or ACC or SEC school. Leave all the mediocre teams from all the huge leagues out for all I care. I want WVa out for Charleston if they don’t win the CAA tournament. For FAU if they don’t win the Sun Belt tourney. Liberty. North Texas.
And anecdotally those high achieving but not conference tournament champion mid major teams perform better in the NCAAT than the high loss P6 teams too. They just don’t get many shots because in reality it’s a P5/6 invitational tournament
If your criteria is “do they have a chance at being a national champion,” then you’d wind up with an 18-team field.
I get it. It would be an expanded variation of what the tournament was before expansion. Top performers in each league. It would be a good tournament that way too, but some of the best teams would get left out. No real right answer.
I’d love a 16 team tournament with 3 game series but I realize that’s completely unrealistic lol but to put it in another frame: I’d really just like to see teams win their way in rather than giving 60-70 teams 18 mulligans to not lose their way out and making it borderline impossible for the other 250+ teams to get a single mulligan. WAB replacing NET would help with this as much as instituting the ‘.500 or better’ rule.
It’s absurd UNC still has an at large chance and 25ish regular season champs don’t. That WVa is in a good spot while North Texas is hopeless is a failure of the current system. Maybe my solution isn’t the only or best one but we need to find a way to get the FAU’s and Liberty’s of the world at least an equal shot at an at large bud as the UNC’s and Wisconsin’s of the world
Before the expansion of the NCAA tournament. When only the conference winners got in.
This I agree with. But note that they have a winning conference record. Conference record is not the problem.
To clarify I’m not saying it’s the problem. It’s a solution to the problem of leaving out top mid major teams in favor of mediocre P6 teams. I’m open to other solutions. But requiring a .500 record in conference play is the simplest and quickest way to replace mediocre P6 teams with high achieving mid majors that actually won games. Force the committee’s hands.
If the goal is to eliminate the weak major-conference teams, I’d go with WAB as the first attempt. (Or simply give out autobids for regular season champs in the top 16 conferences or something.) Because the “winning conference record” rule doesn’t eliminate the weakest major-conference teams – TCU would be out by this rule, and they’re a 5-seed, whereas the rule wouldn’t hurt the bubbly ACC teams at all, because we all get to use GT/UL/FSU to pad our conference records.
Are there more TCU’s or are they an outlier? While it would suck for the Frogs under my proposal, the current system sucks for a handful of teams every year. So would we be swapping screwing, say 4 teams, to only screw 1? Seems like an upgrade if that’s the case. But if we are just swapping the 4-5 teams that get screwed then it might not be the answer
Agree 100% a WAB metric would be way better than current. Would be on board with giving that a chance for a few years before getting more radical. Might even be able to trick the ACC and Pac 12 to go for it by focusing on their lack of bids the last few years
Looks to me like the three teams that would be disqualified by a “winning conference record” rule would be TCU (5-seed), Iowa State (6-seed), and Miss. State (11-seed; they would certainly be no loss, and may not get in anyway). This is going by Bracket Matrix projections. And of course I might have missed somebody.
I did miss somebody: West Virginia (10-seed). The rule would apply almost only to the Pac-12, which is an oddity in that it doesn’t have a few bad teams in it. (And sorry I thought by winning record you meant >.500 not >=.)