Play-In Game Is Played-Out

The NCAA play-in game, created in 2001 to accomodate two conflicting “mandates” concerning the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, is unfair to small conference teams and should be implemented differently.  The current system punishes players from smaller conferences who have earned the right to be in the tournament and rewards players on sub-par teams from larger conferences, who have done nothing distinctive whatsoever.  This is a case of the rich getting richer, and I think the NCAA should do the right thing and change the system.

As mentioned, the play-in game was created in 2001 to accomodate two conflicting “mandates” the NCAA hath decreed concerning the Men’s Basketball Tournament.  “The first “mandate” is that conferences of an appropriate size and age shall be granted an automatic bid into the tournament.  The second “mandate” is that there be no fewer than 34 at-large bids in a given year.  Starting in 2001, there were 31 conferences that qualified for an automatic bid.  You can do the math.  31 + 34 = 65, or one more than 64.

The obvious answer would’ve been to cut the number of at-large bids by one, but instead, in a move to appease the larger conferences, the NCAA caved and created the unjust play-in game.  The play-in game pits the 64th and 65th ranked teams, as determined by the selection committee, in a contest to see who wins the right to have their asses handed to them by one of the #1 seeds.  These teams are both inevitably one of the smaller conference teams who have technically earned their way into the tournament by winning their conference championship.  They are never one of the inevitable chump mid-major or major conference teams that get into the tournament despite having no business being there, and I think this is unfair.

The NCAA can say what it wants, but the play-in game is not the NCAA tournament.  The tournament starts on Thursday.  All of the other teams start playing on Thursday and Friday.  Nobody has told North Carolina or Stanford to show up on Tuesday.  CBS is not doing a “Road To The Final Four” pre-game show for the game on Tuesday night.  I think the NCAA is breaking one of its own mandates by making two conference champs play each other for the right to be represented in the real tournament.  For kids at many of those schools, just getting to appear in one NCAA tournament game will be the pinnacle of their collegiate careers.  I think it’s unfair that a team of kids that did everything that was asked of them – namely, win their conference – is forced to win one more game for the right to play in the real tournament.

Tuesday night, for instance, Oakland and Alabama A&M will play in the play-in game.  They both won their conference championships.  Oakland actually has a losing record, and you could argue that they have no business being in the tournament anyway, but they did what was asked of them to win their conference championship.  If Oakland loses Tuesday night and doesn’t get to play in the real tournament on Friday, how is it fair that teams like Northern Iowa or Iowa State, neither of whom won their conference, will get to play on the first weekend of the tournament?

I’m not calling for a radical change.  I still think that teams like Oakland and Alabama A&M should be low (read #15 or #16) seeds.  But I also think that they should be rewarded with the experience of the first weekend of the tournament.  My idea is that the lowest rated at-large teams should have to play in the play-in game for the right to be in the real tournament.  This year, that might be Northern Iowa and Iowa State.  Though neither of these are traditional powerhouse schools, they are still from larger conferences that carry certain built-in advantages that these smaller schools will never have.

I think this change would not only be more fair, but it would make the play-in game itself more exciting as the level of basketball is likely to be higher.  It’s time for the NCAA to stop handing everything to its larger institutions and make a stand for the little guy.  After all, isn’t giving the little guy a chance what March Madness is truly all about?