Read the opposing argument from Bleacher Fan.
Should a highly ranked mid-major team get a tournament bid over a lesser ranked major conference team? In a word… NO. The very term “mid-major” signifies a lesser status. Mid-major teams are designated as such because they have historically played in a less competitive conference against poorer quality opponents. I am sure that the Bleacher Fan will attempt to sensationalize and hype up Cinderella stories and tournament upsets, but as Sports Geek points out in his introduction these are exceptions rather than the rule. Yes, even a blind squirrel finds a nut once and a while. If the goal of distributing bids to the tournament is to load the brackets with potential upsets for the sake of drama, then by all means go slumming and add mid-major teams left and right. But, if the tournament’s true goal is to find the best men’s basketball team in the NCAA, then the Big Dance should be left to the big boys.
Mid-major teams play cream puffs in comparison to major conference teams. Sure there are plenty of 20-win teams in mid-major conferences this season. Big deal! That is only because they are playing other weak teams during conference play. The truth behind a team’s competitive ability is in the caliber of their opponents, not their record.
Sports Geek said he wanted examples, and that is exactly what I am going to give him. The Big South Conference is a mid-major conference. Since the late 1990s Winthrop University has established a reputation as this conference’s perennial powerhouse and risen to mid-major prominence (that is actually a heading on the school’s Wikipedia page). Counting this year’s invitation, the Winthrop Eagles have been to the NCAA tournament a conference record nine times. In 2007 the Eagles even advanced to the second round of the tournament after upsetting a six seeded Notre Dame. This reaffirms my earlier assertion that, yes it is possible for a mid-major school to advance, although it is somewhat of a statistical anomaly. Winthrop, however, was not the only team with an impressive record in the conference. Conference rival Coastal Carolina posted a 28-6 season which ranked them number one in the Big South, yet they probably will not see a tournament birth since Winthrop clinched the conference tournament’s automatic bid.
Using Bleacher Fan’s logic – that a good mid-major deserves a tournament spot over a lesser ranked major conference team – it would be reasonable to assume that Coastal Carolina would deserve a shot over a team like Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech finished seventh in the ACC with a 19-11 record. Allowing Coastal in over Georgia Tech is absurd thinking. Teams like Georgia Tech play a virtual Murder’s Row lineup of schools like Duke, Maryland, Virginia Tech, Florida State, and Clemson (all 20-win teams). Coastal Carolina on the other hand benefits from inflated numbers that give the perception, although significantly skewed, of competitiveness. Coastal Carolina’s wins are rice paper thin. They won 28 games because they played teams like Voorhees College, Bridgewater, and North Carolina Central. Excuse me if I do not get excited about their chances in the tournament, but I have never been a fan of lost causes.
If you think I am just making generalizations let’s look at the previous example from a different perspective. Instead let’s examine how both teams faired against a similar opponent – Duke University. Both teams played Duke University last season, but the results are very different. Coastal Carolina was blown out by the Blue Devils 74-49, but Georgia Tech was able to pull out a victory, winning 71-67. Duke is an elite caliber major conference team… the type that a twelfth seeded tourney team would more than likely be matched against. The record clearly shows that a mid-major team just cannot hang, while a significantly lower ranked major team seems ready to rumble against.
Mid-major teams are just that – “mid” major. They are subpar, less than. Yet for some reason there seems to be groups of masochists who want to offer them up as sacrificial lambs to the major conference teams all in the name of the Cinderella story. This weak-minded, wide-eyed optimism should be reserved for fair tales not sports.
The tournament is best served when the BEST representatives from each conference participate. It’s not about creating a Cinderella story.
By your logic, there is no reason at all to play a regular season. By your logic, the tournament invitations should be distributed by hype alone to the “big boys”, simply because they ARE “big boys”, and token invitations should be given sparingly, strictly to the tournament champions of those so-called subpar teams from the Mid-Majors. The regular season, by your logic, is a complete waste of time.
You also seem to have forgotten the fact that schools like Memphis, Gonzaga, and Butler are also Mid-Major programs.
Gonzaga lost to St. Mary’s in their tournament championship over the weekend… should they not be invited to the Dance? Of course they should! Why? Because their performance throughout the ENTIRE SEASON warrants it.