Tournament Time

                                                         Tournament Time

     I am not going to deny that Rutgers beating Illinois on Saturday to finish the regular season 31 game slate (way too many games) 14-17 and 3-15 in the Big 10 didn't feel good--it did.

     Nor did it not feel good to see Princeton end the regular season undefeated in Ivy League play including watching a televised win against second place Harvard on Friday night from Jadwin Gym.

     Seton Hall went out to venerable Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis on Saturday and handed the Butler Bulldogs a defeat, closing their season with 20 wins and a possible NCAA bid. Nice.

    Moreover,  New Jersey's Monmouth University finished the regular season by winning the Metro Athletic Athletic Conference title once more. A positive.

     Plus, the University of Connecticut women remained the only undefeated squad in Division I men's and women's play. Excellent.

     This is all well and good. For Princeton, Seton Hall and Monmouth, they are at least somewhat likely to play in the Big Dance, alternatively known as the NCAA Division I Men's Championship, which starts next week. Rutgers would have to have a miracle happen for it to entry into the NCAA's. UConn is a lock for the Women's Championship and should be the overall No. 1 seed when the field is announced.

     Winning the regular season in your conference guarantees just one thing--that you are the top seed in the conference post-season tournament. A conference post-season tournament was rare when I was younger. Only the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Missouri Valley Conference and the Southern Conference held such events to crown their champion.

     The NCAA tournament back in the 1950's and 60's had not morphed into the big deal it is today with 68 teams invited to play. At the outset in 1939 through 1950, 8 teams, fewer regular season games and, for most schools, finishing first in the conference sent the team to the NCAA's. Second place might get you to the National Invitation Tournament at Madison Square Garden in New York City.  For a number of years thereafter, the size of the field was between 22 and 24 teams. The great UCLA Bruins, 10 time winners between 1964 and 1975 and coached by the legendary John Wooden, did not have to travel the maze which todays' teams like Villanova last year had to do--win 6 games over nearly 4 weeks.

     There was a lot of grumbling when teams would finish second and not make the NCAA tourney. For a while, the head of the NCAA, Walter Byers, resisted any change in the format. The primary genesis for the expansion of the NCAA Championship came when a talented University of Maryland team coached by Charles "Lefty" Driesell, won the ACC regular season but lost the tournament. They sat home with a very talented team, rewarded with nothing for their efforts, and defeated in an event held almost always in Greensboro, North Carolina, to the delight of the in-state fans from the University of North Carolina, North Carolina State, Duke University and Wake Forest University.

     After a failed second place tournament run by the NCAA,  the field was expanded to a robust 32 teams in 1975. Rutgers, in its bicentennial year of 1976 run to the Final Four, which was now a big thing nationally, played 4 games plus a consolation match when they lost in the semi-finals.

     With longer schedules and more money coming from national television rights, from 1979 to 1985, the field kept expanding to ultimately 64 schools being selected by a committee. It stayed that way only until 2000, and then a play-in contest was added for a 65th school. In 2011, the current field of 68 was established with 2 play-in games.

     The Final Four had left its home in Kansas City nearby the NCAA Headquarters in Overland Park, Kansas and went from college home floors to bigger "neutral" site venues. With interest peaking and having seen in 1968 that a bigger arena like Houston's Astrodome, the first-ever indoor baseball stadium, could be jammed to the rafters when UCLA was involved, the Final Four and some of the regional matches were transferred to places like the New Orleans Superdome, the indoor home of the NFL's Saints to accommodate larger crowds and make more money for the NCAA coffers.

     Thus, getting into the NCAA's became big business. The perennial winners--Kentucky, North Carolina--did not necessarily have to win the regular season to get into the field; they were virtual locks to be invited. Believe it or not--5 colleges--Army, The Citadel,  Northwestern, St. Francis (Brooklyn) and William and Mary--have NEVER played in an NCAA tournament game (it appears that Northwestern just might break that streak this season). Many, many more colleges have long droughts from their last appearance in the field--Rutgers' 26 years without a return appearance pales in comparison to Dartmouth College's 57 year skein, and that was less than Harvard's 66 year wait  which ended in 2012.

     Along with the expansion of the NCAA field came a corresponding phenomenon. Post-season tournaments which guaranteed an automatic bid to the Dance. Before long, almost every conference held a post-season tournament to establish a winner of that coveted automatic bid. Colleges that did not win that event would be selected to at-large berths based upon complex analysis by a group of athletic directors holed up in a hotel, usually in Kansas City, who would ultimately determine the Championship participants.

     The bigger and better basketball conferences like the ACC, the Big East, the Big 10, the Southeastern Conference to cite a few, would receive multiple bids for their teams, while the "lesser" conferences like the MAAC or Northeast Conference or the Ivy and Patriot Leagues rarely if ever had two teams playing. For the latter schools, who normally played the power conference teams only in an in-season tournament or more likely at the home of the bigger school, had their secondary chances minimized. Those schools had to win a post-season conference tournament to attain an automatic bid. Thus--win and you're in; lose and you play elsewhere for a lot less prestige. Or you can join the rest of us and watch.

     The expansion of the NCAA men's field led to miraculous upsets like a Villanova team defeating a much more heralded Georgetown team; ditto N.C. State upsetting the University of Houston.  These lower seeded at-large teams which no one expected to win much at all and were in effect filling out the field, led to the coining of the nickname March Madness attaching to the NCAA's. Whether a 15 seeded team from the Atlantic Sun Conference could upset any Power 5 school or another lower-seeded school could epically have a Cinderella-like "march" to the title game during the month of March when the bulk of the games are played was good for viewer interest. (Illegal office pools sprung up everywhere, so people were betting in some form on teams to win).

     Seeing that ESPN television money could help a conference's revenue stream, almost every conference with the exception of the august Ivy League, held a conference championship tournament to designate the automatic bid to the NCAA's. Invariably, just like the Big Dance, the aforementioned Cinderella teams would emerge and run the gamut--some with overall losing records.  And now, capitulating to the way things are in college basketball, for the first time this year, the Ivy League will have the top four teams square off at the University of Pennsylvania's home floor, the venerable Palestra. Plus all of this is mirrored in microcosm for the women.

     But that kind of scenario resonated excitement, at least in the smaller, less powerful conferences. With the bigger conferences, the tournaments captured and captivated the big cities--the Big East Tournament is perennially in New York at the Garden to capacity crowds, or a locale like Las Vegas can end up holding 2 almost simultaneously. Tournaments became big moneymakers for the cities like New York; so much so that the Big 10 expansion to include Rutgers and Maryland to make inroads into the New York and D.C. markets has led to abandoning the normal, more geographically-centered sites of Chicago and Indianapolis to this year holding court in Washington and next year taking over Madison Square Garden AFTER the Big East concludes its business.

     I especially feel  for the bubble teams left out to play in marginal post-season tournaments led by the NIT, which was actually more prestigious than the NCAA's through 1950 when CCNY won both and then was exposed in a gambling sting which tainted New York basketball and kept the NCAA's out of the Garden. This is akin to the plethora of unnecessary bowl games in college football. How many games need to be played in one season--where does academics fit in anyway? I feel for the 1 and done conference schools too. There is no equity in big time college basketball.

     Nonetheless, as a prelude to the NCAA's,  I found myself rooting for Wichita State to win the Missouri Valley, which they did or to marvel at the wild heave to the basket by the St. Francis (PA) player which somehow went in at the buzzer to beat Wagner in the NEC tourney. I was hoping Monmouth could remain dominant in the MAAC but Siena capitalized on its home floor in Albany to upset the Hawks and imperil the Jersey Shore five's chance at an NCAA bid; that Princeton survives two games in Philadelphia; that Seton Hall plays like last year and upsets the Big East field again enroute to the Big East title; or that Rutgers emerges from the #14 seed garnered by finishing last in the Big 10 and knocks off a team or two. I want the UConn women and Hall of Fame Coach Geno Auriemma to beat all comers again, while maintaining their incredible streak of over 100 straight victories.

     We're in March Madness. As artificial a thing as can be--like it or not. It sure beats the boring repetitiveness of the NBA right now or exhibition baseball games. It is the precursor to warmer weather which baseball used to be. Just as Spring brings hope to us as we spend more time outdoors, so does tournament time act as an ingrained rite of passage between the seasons.

     I see a bevy of TV time ahead for us basketball junkies. For some, wives and children become secondary unless they too join in the craziness. We better buy plenty of provisions for the next month and fasten our seat belts, for the roller coaster ride has begun in earnest.