Crazy Conference Tournament Brackets

It's March.  Which means we'll be on college basketball overload for the next few weeks.  The Power 5 leagues are still finishing up conference play, but conference tournaments have already begun in the mid-majors.  Everybody knows that these are one-bid leagues, so the conference tournaments have that much more meaning in these smaller conferences.  Which is what makes them so much fun to watch.

Conference tournaments used to be a straightforward proposition.  However many teams were in the league, you'd set your bracket so that everyone participates and is seeded accordingly.  If you have 10 teams, the top six get a bye, the other four have to play an extra game.  However many rounds there are, that's the number of days you need.  Most conferences had 10-12 teams, so the conference tournaments generally took four days from start to finish.

As conferences expanded, so did their tournaments.  Extra games and extra days had to be added.  Some conferences (I'm sure with TV and arena considerations taken into account) opted to keep the same number of days, games and teams, adding a new wrinkle of making teams need to qualify for the conference tournament.  While others have taken full advantage of their unwieldy conference sizes to have equally unwieldy conference tournaments. 

This season for the first time, all 18 teams will qualify for the Big Ten Tournament.  A six-day, 17-game extravaganza where the bottom four teams in the conference have to win six games in six days while the top four have byes into the quarterfinals, meaning they only need to win three in three.  The Big Ten bracket is at least straightforward, though.  Which is more than I can say for the absolute craziness some of the mid-majors are providing us.

Let's start with our friends in the West Coast Conference, who've used their stepladder tournament format for several years now.  With Washington State and Oregon State temporarily playing in the WCC while they rebuilt the Pac-12, the WCC Tournament has 12 teams this season.  It'll take six days to finish the tournament.  Why?  Because they're only playing two games a day!

In the WCC, the top two seeds (who are almost always Gonzaga and Saint Mary's in either order) get a bye into the semifinals!  The 3 & 4 seeds get byes into the quarterfinals, with the 5 & 6 seeds entering the round before that and the 7 & 8 seeds playing the winners of the first-round games between the bottom four teams.  Does it make sense?  Logically, yes.  Is it super unwieldy?  Absolutely!

The stepladder tournament was originally just a West Coast Conference thing.  They've now been one-upped by the Sun Belt Conference, which is doing the same thing, but with 14 teams.  Which means seven rounds!  The conference tournament will literally take a week!  And that's not even the craziest thing about it.

Finishing in the top two and getting that bye all the way to the semifinals is obviously a huge advantage in these stepladder tournaments.  Except the Sun Belt was such an evenly-balanced conference this season that there was a six-way tie for second (all of whom were only one game out of first)!  After the tiebreakers were applied, Marshall ended up with the 2-seed, meaning they only need to win two games to get the Sun Belt's NCAA bid.  Meanwhile, Arkansas State, which had the same conference record as Marshall, is the 7-seed and has to win five games in five days.

Therein lies the problem with stepladder tournaments.  In the WCC, it's hardly mattered or even really been noticed since Gonzaga and Saint Mary's are clearly the top two teams by a wide margin.  But, as the Sun Belt showed us, you can have two teams finish with the same record and one get an extremely favorable path while the other very much doesn't.  A problem that wouldn't exist in a traditional tournament format with four quarterfinals and the top two seeds not getting such a ridiculous advantage over everybody else.

Then there's the Horizon League, which is giving us the most unique conference tournament format I've ever seen.  There are 11 teams in the Horizon League.  The tournament started with a 10 vs. 11 play-in game for the right to go against the No. 1 seed in the first round.  The first round then consisted of five games played on campus.  The five teams that advanced were then reseeded, with the bottom two teams playing another play-in game at the conference tournament site to see who'll be the fourth semifinalist.

Are you as confused by this format as I am?  It's like something you'd see in a double-elimination conference baseball or softball tournament where they're trying to protect the top seed as best they can.  And the reseeding thing would even make sense if they were having four teams go right to the semifinals.  But the second play-in game is as stupid as it is unnecessary.  Why not just have two first-round games and four quarterfinals?

All of these wacky conference tournaments are designed with the NCAA Tournament in mind.  No conference wants to see its 6-seed go on a run and end up in Dayton (although, I'm not entirely sure why...a First Four win counts the same as any other NCAA Tournament win).  They all want to have their best team represent the conference in the NCAA Tournament, especially if they're a one-bid league.  So, they're doing everything they can to make sure the regular season champion (or, at worst, the 2-seed) has the best chance of advancing.  Which isn't a guarantee even with some of these crazy setups.

While I have no data to support this theory, I'd even argue that some of these tournament formats may actually be a disadvantage to the higher seeds.  Not only do they have an immense amount of pressure on them, they're sitting around waiting while everyone else is playing.  It's the classic rest vs. rust argument.  And if a team gets hot, a higher-seeded team, even a well-rested one, ain't doing anything to stop them.  (In the glory days of the Big East Tournament, we saw Gerry McNamara's Syracuse team and Kemba Walker's UConn team both win five games in five days to win the championship.)

And, ultimately, it doesn't matter.  Whether intended or not, the wacky formats have achieved another goal.  They've got people talking about them.  If they didn't have a ridiculous six-way tie, no one would know how quirky the Sun Belt Tournament setup is.  So, I guess they're getting the last laugh after all.  Because they've got people paying attention to the conference tournament instead of just the final.  Where the higher seeds may or may not capitalize on the huge advantage they've been given.