March, money is all that matters
Iona, the team that finished in a tie for third place in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference’s regular-season standings, went to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
Monmouth, which went 18-2 in regular-season league play and finished a whopping six games ahead of the 12-8 Gaels, didn’t.
Vermont, the first America East Conference team to finish 16-0 in the regular season, needed to rally from a ninepoint deficit with eight minutes left to get past the UAlbany men (10-6 in league play), or else it would have joined Monmouth in the NIT, otherwise known as the “Not Invited Tournament.”
The Albany women, 12-4 in America East play, went dancing while New Hampshire and its 15-1 league record, didn’t.
Those are just the two conferences that involve our local Division I programs.
And, so it goes throughout the country. It proves one thing. The regular season is meaningless. Why even bother to play it when the only reward is an insignificant piece of hardware for the trophy case?
All that matters is three or four games in early March, the ones that make up leagues’ postseason tournaments.
That’s all that determines NCAA berths for mid-major level conferences like the ones that involve our local teams.
Oh, regular season games have meaning for the power conferences like the ACC that sent nine (NINE!) of its teams to the national-championship event.
All teams at that level have to do is hover around .500 in league play, knock off a bunch of non-league patsies to get 19 or 20 wins prior to Selection Sunday, and their proverbial ticket is punched.
But, win 26 games like the New Hampshire women, or 27 like the Monmouth men, and it’s all for naught when it comes to getting to the NCA A’s.
Or, have a nationalbest 20-game winning streak and a 28-5 record like Vermont did prior to its 56-53 squeaker of a victory over Albany in the America East tournament’s championship game. Had Albany held on, the Catamounts would have been on the wrong side of the NCAA bubble.
None of that is to say that the Monmouth men or the New Hampshire women deserved at-large berths, or that Vermont should have gotten one had it fell to the Great Danes.
That’s probably asking for too much, considering the multitude of mathematical formulas that would tax Albert Einstein’s brain power that go into determining the NCAA’s at-large teams.
We won’t begin to get into how teams like Monmouth and its 27-6 record couldn’t even get on the board as a potential at-large team, while Jim Boeheim whined endlessly that his Syracuse team was “slighted” while finishing with an 18-14 record and a Ratings Percentage Index of 84 while Monmouth’s was 49.
We’ll keep this debate exclusively about the fairness, or lack thereof, of determining NCAA berths for mid-major level conferences with a short postseason tournament. And, we’ll continue to use Monmouth as the perfect example.
The Hawks dominated the MAAC this season, finishing with the largest margin over a secondplace team in eight years, and, then, lost their second-best player (forward Micah Seaborn) after the conference tournament’s first round due to a foot injury.
Without him, they lost to Siena, 89-85 in the MAAC event’s semifinal round.
It probably would have been a different finish had Seaborn played that game. Instead, Monmouth’s NCAA dream was over.
And, so, 20 games that produced a dominant regular-season champion were meaningless.
The MAAC, and others like it, play an entire season only to determine seeding position in a conference tournament.
Heck, Monmouth even had to play fourth-seeded Siena on the Saints’ home court.
The New Hampshire women got beat in the America East tournament by Maine ... in Portland, Me.
At least Vermont got to play in its own Patrick Gymnasium in the America East men’s championship contest.
Using league postseason tournaments to determine NCAA berths just isn’t fair.
Ever wonder why it’s done that way?
Like just about everything else in our modern sports world, it’s all about money. Big money.
The MAAC has been getting a guarantee north of $300,000 from arenas and communities that host its postseason for the last several years. That’s close to 10 percent of the league’s entire operating budget, the last time we checked.
We’re guessing America East gets a similarly substantial financial benefit from its postseason event.
And the Ivy League, the last bastion of academic integrity before all else, held its first NCAAberth-determining postseason championship tournament this year.
In it, Penn, 6-8 in league play, missed a free throw with 12 seconds in regulation that probably would have knocked off 14-0 Princeton and assuredly would have eliminated the much-more deserving Tigers from the NCAA’s.
We’ll give credit to Boeheim for one thing he said of late.
When discussing the controversial move of the ACC Tournament out of its traditional southern sites to Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, Boeheim admitted it’s all about what’s best for business.
In other words, it’s about where the ACC can reap the greatest financial benefit. Yes, it’s all about money.
In a fair world, a regular-season championship should result in a conference’s automatic berth to the NCAA’s. If there’s a regular-season tie, hold a one-game tie-breaker to determine which team goes.
League tournaments could still be held, with the winner, if it’s not the regular-season champ, getting an automatic berth to the NIT.
But, with only an NIT berth on the line, fan interest would drop precipitously, attendance would fall and leagues wouldn’t make anywhere near as much money from those events as they do now.
So, you know that won’t ever happen.