The Rearview: 3/17

First off, Happy St. Patrick’s Day. I wish that was enough to have a day off. Sadly, it’s just another day.

But the bright spot is that today is also “The Day of the Bracket”. Everyone frantically printing brackets and trying to figure out who is going to be this year’s George Mason. It really is a good time of year. For all those teams that made it through the long 30+ game regular season, now it’s just 6 to go. 6 games to determine your season. A novel idea don’t you think? The teams get to decide who #1 is. Sort of. I’ll get to that in a minute.

Before that, I want to congratulate the Georgia Bulldogs. 4 games in 3 days to win the SEC tournament, all I can do is give a good “slow clap” for you guys. After we got beat, I said, better UGA than anyone else. Good for you. You were the good story this weekend, in an otherwise downer of a weekend in Atlanta due to the storms that ravaged the area.

Now, on to the NCAA Tournament. I’ll leave all the debating on our bracket to the threads and our resident experts to break it down for us. Admittedly, they have the basketball acumen that I just don’t have when it comes to personnel match ups and style of play match ups. But I will say, even I can see we got an extremely tough draw. Butler and Louisville just to have the chance to play North Carolina? Jeez, makes me tired thinking about it. I also don’t have a problem with us as a 2 seed. I think the fact that we can seriously have a debate about “we should have been a 1 seed” speaks volumes about how far we’ve come as a program. The 2 in the East……..eh, now that’s a stretch. Bruce was right. We got seeded 8th overall, and that is wrong.

Which brings me back to my original point; as much as we all love the brackets and March Madness, there is still one thing that is not resolved with this system. The need for the debate continues. And I want to be clear here…..I am not trashing the tournament. Nor am I suggesting that the winner of this tournament is not the undisputed National Champion. The only thing I am presenting is that even with a single elimination tournament, a playoff if you will, that consists of 65, that’s SIXTY FIVE, teams, there is still a debate as to who should have gotten in, should have been left out, and I even heard a coach on one of the shows last night say he was for expanding the field to 128 teams…ONE HUNDRED and TWENTY-EIGHT.

Why is this a big deal to me? As many of you know, I am against a play off in college football. Many of you think I’m crazy. And most of that group point to the Tournament as exhibit A as to why it would work and why it’s an improvement over the BCS. Last disclaimer, promise, I’m not necessarily defending the BCS in it’s current format, just stipulating it’s not AS BAD as it is always made out to be.

Why do I think this way you ask? Good question, here are my reasons:

1. Regular season means nothing. If you think it does, (it just so happens we are the perfect example of it this season) ask Bruce Pearl right now how important his 28-3, SEC championship, #1 RPI, #1 SOS regular season was. All it got him was a 2 seed in arguably the toughest region, where if he’s lucky, he gets to play Tyler Hansbrough and UNC…..in Charlotte. Congrats coach!

Consider also, Virginia Tech is the 4th place team in the ACC (#1 overall RPI conference) and wasn’t one of the 4 ACC teams selected. Why? Georgia won the SEC tourney and probably had an assist in knocking VT out. Play hard in the NIT VT!! Georgia was the 6 seed in the SEC East.

2. Too many teams. 65 teams and there is still debating who should be in, who got shafted and who shouldn’t be there. And you will tell me that 8 or 16 teams are enough in football? Just like today, there’s a #66 screaming at the top of their lungs about being screwed, there will most definitely be a #9 or #17 doing the same.

3. Who determines who plays? Polls. Committee. Both pure evil as far as I’m concerned. Neither offer a satisfactory resolution to the age old question….who is the better team? And this is where I now agree with anyone that says it should be settled on the field/court. It should be. It’s the addition of the “at large” team that has created this monster. Who should get in? Conference Champions. Regular season. The conference tourneys only exist to generate revenue. Period. Sure it’s a great, warm and fuzzy, up lifting story when a team like Georgia that went 4-12 in the conf. now gets its shot in the Big Dance, but make no mistake, that opportunity only came about to line pockets. And those pockets got happier now that a 6th team from the SEC gets in the NCAA’s. Oh, and I’m not against lining pockets. Just don’t tell me “it’s all for the kids” and expect me to swallow hook, line and sinker, k? VT deserves to be in more than Georgia. How do those kids feel? Exactly.

This is where playoff talk really goes astray for me. It’s the determination of who plays that gets me every time. And in football it just happens to be under a bigger microscope than basketball. You simply can’t play as many football games as they do in basketball. Thus there is a little more room for error in basketball than there is in football.

And despite that, there are a couple of dozen teams today complaining about something. Their region is too tough (you laugh, but you ought to hear UNC fans calling in today, it’s as if the NCAA didn’t get the memo regarding UNC’s invitation to San Antonio, rather they actually have to deal with the idle, mundane tasks of actually having to play games in Raleigh and Charlotte. If I hear another UNC fan utter the phrase “there’s no advantage here, it’s too hard”, I’m going to throw up), we’re in the wrong region, we’re seeded too low, they’re seeded too high etc, etc, etc……so even the perfect system isn’t perfect.

And we’re back to the imperfect BCS system. It’s not perfect either. But I still contend, the regular season is the best part about college football, and in a sport that only has a 12 game regular season (and a 1/3 of the total teams participating in the sport compared to basketball), that has to remain the constant. Also, winning your conf. in football has to remain a significant accomplishment. At the end of the day, in football, we have a system that does determine it on the field. Every Saturday a scoreboard tells me who the better team is. In basketball, I get to go thru 4 ½ months of a regular season and determine a champion, then a weekend conference tournament to determine another, separate champion, and then I still have to wait until late March so a committee can tell me who can play for it all. This is the only point in the basketball season where the score board is the only thing that matters (can you imagine the thought of a ‘good loss’ in football?)

Funny thing about both sports and their post seasons though……..they both generate an obscene amount of prognostication, debate and discussion. What other sports’ post seasons are analyzed and picked apart like these two? What fun would there be if everything were black and white and written in stone?

Isn’t the debate the best part of it anyway? If you are going to remain a fan of a team participating in both sports………it has to be. Otherwise you are just going to be one irate fan most of the time.

So, enjoy it for the next week or so. If we’re lucky, we’ll get a dream shot. Taking on the Tar Heels in Charlotte and knocking them off would be an unbelievable feat.

That would be a scoreboard worth remembering.

Go Vols. Beat American.