It’s March Madness time again, and yes I will be filling in my brackets soon. I certainly don’t claim to be a college hoops expert but I have won a big money pool before.
Every selection Sunday you hear the complaints about bubble teams not making the tournament and debate on which teams shouldn’t have gotten bids. You can always debate whether Syracuse should have gotten a bid in place of Arkansas, but what bugs me are complaints that automatic bids given to mid-major tournament champions take away at-large bids from “more deserving” schools. For instance, schools like Jackson State who won the SWAC title and Delaware State who won MEAC are clearly inferior to teams that didn’t make the tournament like Syracuse, Drexel, West Virginia, or Kansas State. But so what? March Madness shouldn’t just be about the best 65 teams outright. If the tournament is supposed to represent the entire NCAA then they’re doing it right to have every conference tournament champion make the national tournament whether they’re ranked in the top-65 or not. With less than a dozen teams making the tournament only because of an automatic bid, the top 50 teams in the nation still get to go dancing – more than enough to allow all of the best teams in.
Speaking of 65 teams, the play-in game is BS. The NCAA refuses to call it a play-in game but what else could you call an extra round that all of the other 63 teams get to skip. Not only is that not fair but it’s an insult to Delaware State and Jackson State who won their conference tournaments to earn their automatic bid. If you must have a play-in game, why not respect the teams that won their conference tournaments, and force Stanford (11) to play Old Dominion (12) for the right to move on to the real first round and face #1 seed Kansas.
P.S. Shout out to my peeps in the Logger Nation
