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An end to auto-bids?

Buffnik

Buffnik

Real name isn't Nik
Club Member
Junta Member
In 2022, 32 of 68 tourney bids were automatically awarded to conference champions.

While we all know the tournament is not the 68 best teams, I would argue that the magic of the Dance is the Cinderella stories. Maybe there are too many D1 conferences, but I'm sure as hell more interested in a small conference champion facing a top 4 seed in Rd1 than I am in a major conference team that's barely .500 taking its shot.

Another money move being proposed that's not about the value or quality of the product but about whose hands that money goes to.

Disluke.

 
Very much dislike. I’m beginning to really dislike college athletics in general. The things that made it special and exciting are being eliminated.
I wouldn’t mind it if they scaled it back to a 64-team field, did away with the Dayton play ins, and stopped messing with the formula.
 
Another step towards college sports being essentially another level of professional sports.

We already have the round of play in games giving us 68 teams instead of 64.

The NCAA would face a tough task telling leagues that they are Division 1 but don't get an automatic bid. I could easily see them telling those leagues that their auto bid teams would have to compete in play in rounds.

And yes it is all about money at the expense of integrity. We already see power conference teams get in that didn't even win half of their conference games. Even with that these teams bring more fans and higher TV ratings than a smaller conference champ that earned the right to be there.

And all of this may not matter in 15 years anyways.

We are already seeing P5 football break apart and the SEC and B1G paying players huge amounts of money and trying to monopolize the TV money.

How long until we see the top 25-35 schools dump all affiliation with the NCAA and form their own entity.

At that point we look at the overlap into college basketball. The B1G has been getting what 6-7 tourney bids per year? The SEC getting a few less but multiple bids. They look at the piles of money the NCAA makes on the tourney and say forget about the MAC and the AAC and the Big Sky, we want that money in our bank accounts not theirs.

They may come up with a bigger format that they end up in football to allow for Big East schools and Gonzaga and Kansas but we still see the current 300+ schools cut down to 60 at the most with a smaller tournament with more money going to the big schools.

The days of having a 15 knock of a 2 will be over but they won't care, they will be getting to keep the money.
 
ahoelsken said:
Yeah this isn't happening. Don't need a CU team that won 20 games last year but had one real noteworthy victory (Arizona here) in the dance.
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I agree. If we look at football, the expansion of bowls changed it from a special achievement to something so overblown they have to let 5-win teams in to fill the slots. I believe this is at least as responsible for killing bowls as the playoff or the media companies spreading them out instead of concentrating them between Xmas and NYD.

96 team Dance would hurt the sport by diluting it the same way.
 
Buffnik said:
I agree. If we look at football, the expansion of bowls changed it from a special achievement to something so overblown they have to let 5-win teams in to fill the slots. I believe this is at least as responsible for killing bowls as the playoff or the media companies spreading them out instead of concentrating them between Xmas and NYD.

96 team Dance would hurt the sport by diluting it the same way.
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Except in the tournament, a 20 win CU team that gets hot at the end of the year and has motivation to play for something has a chance to make some noise. The bowl system was one meaningless game.
 
The Alabaster Yak said:
Except in the tournament, a 20 win CU team that gets hot at the end of the year and has motivation to play for something has a chance to make some noise. The bowl system was one meaningless game.
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Even so. It adds nothing since we already have it as good as it can get with Cinderella stories in the Dance.

All it does is make the regular season even less important while adding a week (or 2) to the Dance that's not all that interesting.
 
Buffnik said:
I agree. If we look at football, the expansion of bowls changed it from a special achievement to something so overblown they have to let 5-win teams in to fill the slots. I believe this is at least as responsible for killing bowls as the playoff or the media companies spreading them out instead of concentrating them between Xmas and NYD.

96 team Dance would hurt the sport by diluting it the same way.
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I think the other element to this conversation is this-when was the last time along the lines of CU in 2011 that missed the NCAA tournament and had a legitimate argument to be in?
 
Buffnik said:
Even so. It adds nothing since we already have it as good as it can get with Cinderella stories in the Dance.

All it does is make the regular season even less important while adding a week (or 2) to the Dance that's not all that interesting.
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It’s an extra 28 teams (14 total games) and would essentially just be a bigger “play-in” field. Not even a full extra round (that would 128 total teams).
 
The Alabaster Yak said:
It’s an extra 28 teams (14 total games) and would essentially just be a bigger “play-in” field. Not even a full extra round (that would 128 total teams).
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If it's set up like how we went from 64 to 68, it's a 64-team play-in round to decide who gets to join the 32 teams who got byes. Basically putting everyone below an 8-seed into a play-in game. I think what the big conferences love about the idea is that the revenue shares are lower for the play-in round and few mid-majors are represented in the 1-8 seeds.
 
Buffnik said:
If it's set up like how we went from 64 to 68, it's a 64-team play-in round to decide who gets to join the 32 teams who got byes. Basically putting everyone below an 8-seed into a play-in game. I think what the big conferences love about the idea is that the revenue shares are lower for the play-in round and few mid-majors are represented in the 1-8 seeds.
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Huh?
 
The Alabaster Yak said:
Why not? The Tournament isn’t about who the best team is, it’s just pure chaos and who gets hot. Why not include more teams?
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What happened to having to earn your way into the dance though as an at large?

Take the CSU team in 2021 who missed. Did they have that great an argument to get in? In my opinion, no.
 
The Alabaster Yak said:
Except in the tournament, a 20 win CU team that gets hot at the end of the year and has motivation to play for something has a chance to make some noise. The bowl system was one meaningless game.
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Every team does have a shot though by winning their conference tournament and securing the auto bid for their respective conference. Sure it's a much longer and tougher road but as it should be for teams that didn't have a good enough regular season to get an at-large bid to the field of 68
 
Buffnik said:
Even so. It adds nothing since we already have it as good as it can get with Cinderella stories in the Dance.

All it does is make the regular season even less important while adding a week (or 2) to the Dance that's not all that interesting.
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It also makes "making" the tournament much less significant.

There are a core of teams that expect to make the tournament every year but for a team like CU, like our neighbors CSU and Wyoming, an Oklahoma State or similar school just making the tournament means something. We still look back on years that CU made the tourney, even if they didn't advance, as good years. For the players as well just going to "the dance" means something when most of the schools in your conference don't go.

Add a bunch of mediocre or less teams and yes you might every once in a while get a Cinderella that advances a couple rounds but at the same time almost all of those schools will lose and all you have done is reward mediocracy.

Which also brings us back to my arguments about expanded playoffs in most sports. I don't want to see Cinderella win a title. I want to see the team that was best that year win, not the team that got lucky seating, opponents injured, or just got hot at the end. If that is what you want just throw out the entire season, put all the schools in and have a giant double elimination round robin.
 
Expansion of the tournament makes perfect sense for the SEC. Not so much for pretty much every other conference.
 
Not Sure said:
Expansion of the tournament makes perfect sense for the SEC. Not so much for pretty much every other conference.
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I'm not sure I'm following you. How does it benefit the SEC more then say, the B1G, ACC or Big East?

also, speaking of the Big East, back in the day, when they had 14 teams (and VT was one), only the top 12 made the conference tournament. Tech sucked at men's hoops back then, but the end of the regular season still had interest to basketball fans as we were "Playing to get into the conference tournament". I realize that's sort of pathetic to even say, but if we're talking about changing the structure of the basketball post-season, I like that a lot more than expanding the NCAA.
 
hokiehead said:
I'm not sure I'm following you. How does it benefit the SEC more then say, the B1G, ACC or Big East?

also, speaking of the Big East, back in the day, when they had 14 teams (and VT was one), only the top 12 made the conference tournament. Tech sucked at men's hoops back then, but the end of the regular season still had interest to basketball fans as we were "Playing to get into the conference tournament". I realize that's sort of pathetic to even say, but if we're talking about changing the structure of the basketball post-season, I like that a lot more than expanding the NCAA.
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The SEC isn’t a basketball conference. Expansion would allow them to get in an extra team or two that wouldn’t usually get a bid. It’s a money grab and nothing more.
 
Not Sure said:
The SEC isn’t a basketball conference. Expansion would allow them to get in an extra team or two that wouldn’t usually get a bid. It’s a money grab and nothing more.
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only if they ended up with a disproportionate number of the extra bids, though, right? what's your reasoning that would be the case?
 
hokiehead said:
only if they ended up with a disproportionate number of the extra bids, though, right? what's your reasoning that would be the case?
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The extra at-large bids are going to go to power conference teams, not to the smaller conference schools. Even if the slices of the pie are smaller SEC ends up with more pie. Then if they get a mid-major and beat them revenue goes up further.
 
hokiehead said:
only if they ended up with a disproportionate number of the extra bids, though, right? what's your reasoning that would be the case?
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The extra bids will go by NET rank plus eyeball test & Tier 1 & 2 wins. Most of those extra 28 teams will be from P6 conferences. When the thing shakes out to the final 64, I suspect that a lot more of those 64 would be P6 teams than we currently see.
 
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