DOES MW NEED NEW TOURNEY FORMAT?
Top teams in other conferences get more byes, are fresher for NCAAs
After losing 77-58 against San Diego State at Viejas Arena two weeks ago, Colorado State coach Niko Medved told his players: “We’re going to see this team again.”
The eighth-seeded Rams get their wish after an Isaiah Stevens floater gave them a 67-65 win against Fresno State in the opening round of the Mountain West Tournament and sent them to the quarterfinals against the top-seeded Aztecs at noon today at the Thomas & Mack Center.
If they were in the WCC, they wouldn’t. They’d be playing the 5 seed. Win that, and they’d play the 4 seed. It would take three wins, on the tournament’s fifth day, before they’d see the No. 1 seed.
And there’s a growing conversation within the Mountain West to reconsider its traditional tournament format to reward its best teams with fewer games and more rest, maximizing their chances at getting a favorable seed in the NCAA Tournament and then, ahem, winning once they get there.
The current format: three games in as little as 44 hours, with a 15-hour turnaround for one team before the 3 p.m. Saturday final to accommodate CBS.
The fallout: Mountain West teams that have reached the final in Las Vegas have lost 11 straight NCAA Tournament games.
Maybe it’s simply because the conference isn’t as good as it thinks. Or maybe there’s something more at work. Maybe its teams are exhausted.
“If you make it to the championship game,” SDSU coach Brian Dutcher said, “then that first round NCAA matchup is even harder, because you’re on tired legs, no matter how deep you are. Obviously, we want to play for the championship. That’s why we go. We’re wired to win.
“But I’d be naïve to say there aren’t advantages to not having to play three games in three days. There are advantages to not playing for the championship.”
The Aztecs have reached it all five years that Dutcher has been head coach. They’ve gone 0-3 in the NCAA Tournament. Coincidence, or causation? You have to go back to 2015 to find the last team to reach the Mountain West final and win an NCAA game, SDSU’s 76-64 win against St. John’s in Charlotte, N.C. It’s notable that the game was on Friday instead of Thursday, giving the Aztecs an extra day to rest and travel.
“That’s why the WCC has it seeded differently, where the best two teams have to play only two games,” Dutcher said. “And they’re playing a week early. Their scenario is maybe set up for March better than anyone else.”
Funny he should mention the WCC. Gloria Nevarez, the new Mountain West commissioner who replaced Craig Thompson in January, came from the WCC.
Nevarez points out the WCC
switched to the unique format that grants a “triple bye” to its top two seeds largely because of the huge disparity between the top (Gonzaga, Saint Mary’s) and bottom of the league (Portland, USD), reasoning that metrics and tournament seeding aren’t served by having them automatically meet in the tournament.
“That fit the ecosystem of the WCC at the time,” Nevarez said. “As a league gets more parity, a very healthy league where you’re all stacked together, (maybe) it behooves you to play each other more often. I haven’t had a chance yet to dig into our data, dig into our history, and see where we are and whether a different format could have a benefit.” But she will.
“I’m certainly,” she said, “a proponent of looking at it annually.”
Another factor: Last year, the 12-person NCAA Tournament selection committee almost completely ignored results from conference tournaments. Tennessee won the SEC Tournament and, on paper, should have jumped ahead of Duke from a 3 to 2 seed; it stayed at a 3. Texas A&M made an epic run to the SEC final but didn’t get off the bubble.
One incentive for the 20th-ranked Aztecs (24-6) to win the Mountain West Tournament, besides the obvious motivation of wanting to cut down another net, is securing a No. 5 seed in the NCAA Tournament that likely would get them a midmajor opponent in the first round. A No. 6 probably means a power conference team, and it could be the winner of a play-in game that severely reduces your prep time because you don’t know whom you’re playing until Tuesday or Wednesday night.
“The higher the seed, the better your opportunity to win a game,” Dutcher said. “We’d like the highest seed possible. I just don’t know how much play there’s going to be in the field at this point. Maybe you can climb, but I think it’s tough to move a spot right now. I think a lot of the seeding is pretty set at this point.”
The question then becomes: Do you abandon a format that has favored you in the conference tournament (winning 15 straight quarterfinals and reaching 12 of the last 14 finals) for one that may or may not give you a better chance at winning in the Big Dance?
Dutcher hasn’t officially taken sides yet, but he certainly sounds like a man interested in revisiting the issue at conference meetings this spring. His voice undoubtedly will be influential, coming from a program with 15 regular-season or conference tournament titles, nearly double the next best.
“I think every coach would be all over the board on that,” Medved said. “There are people who have been in leagues that get double byes and don’t like that, either. You have to sit there for two days, and you are playing a team that’s really firing on all cylinders. It can work both ways.
“But when you are talking about San Diego State, they’ve had a lot of success playing three games in three days. We don’t need to protect them anymore than we already do, right?”
Boise State coach Leon Rice, whose Broncos have the No. 2 seed here, has already made up his mind.
“I’m definitely an advocate for it,” he said of granting more byes to the top teams. “When you think about, you play for three months of a grind in the season. These games mean so much, but it’s almost thrown out the window a little bit. … Is that reward enough for a great regular season?
“We’ve all got to sit down and figure it out together and see what would be best. That (WCC model) just makes a lot of sense. You have to reward the best teams, the ones with the body of work throughout the season. I’m not sure our format does that enough.”