Sunday, March 10, 2002
The strange saga of Butler University is Example A in today's lesson on college basketball, which could be entitled: It may be March Madness but Championship Week is maddening.
The Bulldogs won the regular season championship of the Horizon League, a process which lasted about 31/2 months (more, if you consider all of preseason practice). Winning that marathon entitled Butler to a pat on the back and an "atta boy" from the league office.
The invitation to the "Big Dance", aka, the NCAA Tournament, was sent to Chicago, University of Illinois at, which won a 3-day sprint before a lot of fans disguised as empty seats in the Convocation Center at Cleveland State University.
The Flames finished sixth in the Horizon League regular season. They are 20-13 now, but are ranked 129th in the RPI.
Butler, on the other hand, despite losing in the first round of the league tournament, is 25-5 and No. 77 in the RPI.
Example B: This situation is hardly unique to the Horizon League, of course. In the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference, Rider and Marist tied for the regular season championship with 13-3 records. Siena, though, won the conference tournament and will represent the MAAC in the NCAA Tournament as "champion" with a 16-18 record.
It's a conflict that hurts the so-called "mid-major" programs more than those in the power conferences, like the Big Ten, which, even in a down year, will get five -- maybe six -- teams in the Big Dance.
You may ask, then, why have these tournaments?
Well, it's done for one obvious reason -- money.
See, the Horizon League won't get on ESPN -- unless Butler is playing in one of the early season tournaments in Hawaii or Alaska -- unless it has a tournament championship game.
The same goes for the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference and countless others.
Hi Mom: For schools in all those conferences, there is one chance to be on national television each season.
Contrast that situation to a school like Ohio State, whose fans in this area have complained in the last two weeks because games against Indiana and Michigan State were "only" on ESPN-Plus, a pay-per-view cousin of the monster network.
The solution seems rather obvious -- in theory anyway, because it'll never fly in reality.
The regular season champion -- in the Horizon's case, Butler -- gets the automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament. If a second team wins the conference tournament -- provided it has a winning record -- it also gets a bid.
This accomplishes a couple of things. One, only teams with records above .500 or within a couple of games can participate (sorry, YSU) in the conference tournaments. In Siena's case, they started the MAAC tournament with a record of 13-18, so they wouldn't have been invited.
Make more room: Secondly, it would mean the NCAA Tournament would probably have to be expanded, but they couldn't have a set number of teams until all the conference tournaments were concluded.
If this scenario was in place this season, Butler and Illinois-Chicago would receive NCAA bids, as would Southern Illinois (the regular season champion) and Creighton (the tournament champ) in the Missouri Valley Conference.
As it is now, Southern Illinois and Butler will be like the rest of us with a financial stake in the tournament (i.e., pools) -- glued to our TV sets during the Selection Show.
XRob Todor is sports editor of The Vindicator. Write to him at todor@vindy.com.