Let’s. Get. Nuts.
The ACC coaches met on Wednesday and came up with a bold proposal that I am frankly in love with — their proposal is that, this year, every single Division I basketball team should make the NCAA tournament.
Every single team!
Jon Rothstein and Jeff Goodman had the story first, with Goodman getting Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim to confirm it. Boeheim said to Goodman: “This is a unique time and it’s time to do something different.”
It’s tempting to just give the thumbs up to this plan using the logic of “chaos above everything.” And, for one bizarre year at least, it would be delightful to see Duke playing Cal Poly in a 1-64 opening round match-up.
But it actually makes a lot of sense for the NCAA to adopt this plan.
Why? Because there is absolutely no way to fairly evaluate all the teams this year. So, the only solution is to let every team in the tournament.
Look around Division I basketball. The Ivies have postponed all sports until January, meaning in theory their basketball teams could start up months after other schools. The Pac-12 has also postponed all sports through the calendar year.
If those teams start up in January, or later, or keep games only within conference, you could have some teams playing twice as many games as other teams in the same division.
So now imagine you’re an ACC school like Florida State. You play a full schedule, and finish the season 18-13. Then along comes a Pac-12 team, say Arizona State, that plays an abbreviated schedule in 2021, say it’s only conference games, and finishes 11-7. In this scenario, neither wins their conference tourney.
In that (decently plausible) scenario … I have no idea how the tournament committee could possibly evaluate those two teams, or how they could possibly decide if one should make the tournament over another. There would be no way to do it fairly.
You’d be guessing how Arizona State would have fared out of conference, or projecting how Florida State would have fared had they played an abbreviated schedule. It’d be nonsense.
The only fair way, as bananas as it is, would be to let everyone in.
The regular season would be all about fighting for a high seed in a huge tournament. You’d probably need to introduce (possible multiple) byes in this mega tourney, meaning teams would compete for those.
Teams might get annoyed at having a lower seed than they should if their season got postponed for a bit, but at least they’d have a ticket to the dance. They would have their shot.
It would be wild, but in a year like this, I’m not sure how else to do it.
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