14 conferences have their championship finals today and 5 more have their semi-finals.\u00a0 No game from the regular season means more than this weekend’s games – win one game today (or two if you are one of the 5 conferences playing Sunday) and you are invited to the NCAA Championship.<\/p>\n
At first, I didn’t like the conference tournaments.\u00a0 I hated that small schools that go 17-1 in their regular season and then lose in a conference championship find themselves in the NIT.\u00a0 OK – I still hate that.\u00a0 It doesn’t matter if you have an RPI in the 30s and 25+ wins – none of them are against teams the committee values, and so your season’s dream of playing for the NCAA Championship is over.<\/p>\n
But the conference tournaments do produce something that is great drama, and ultimately good for the game.\u00a0 They are the ultimate play-in game.\u00a0 Take the SWAC championship.\u00a0 Texas Southern (14-19) and Ark-Pine Bluff (14-20) had awful non-conference seasons.\u00a0 But they pulled it together once they got into conference to go 12-6 and tie for 2nd in the SWAC.\u00a0 Now, one of those teams will be playing in the NCAA Touranment.\u00a0 You can have a horrible December and it doesn’t end your season.\u00a0 You still have a chance.<\/p>\n
Take Alabama – who looked like they were locked into the tournament until they lost their last 5 regular season games (although to be fair, it looks like all 5 of those games were to tournament teams).\u00a0 Now, thanks to the SEC Tournament, they have upset Texas A&M and regular-season co-champ Auburn to make the semi-finals.\u00a0 Their NCAA resume is renewed, and if they can beat Kentucky today and the winner of the Tennessee \/ Arkansas game on Sunday, they don’t have to worry about the bubble.\u00a0 You can have a horrible February and it doesn’t end your season.\u00a0 You still have a chance.<\/p>\n
Many of us, including myself, will complain about the teams that get snubbed – it isn’t March if the Lunatic isn’t ranting about something.\u00a0 But at the end of the day, every team had the chance to take the decision out of the selection committee’s hands.\u00a0 Sure, beating Virginia and Duke to win the ACC is harder than beating\u00a0 the SWAC’s top two regular season teams, Grambling and Prairie View A&M.\u00a0 But if you are in the ACC you also had plenty of chance to build your resume.<\/p>\n
Congratulations to bubble teams like Alabama and Providence (who upset Xavier to make the Big East final against Villanova).\u00a0 They are taking full opportunity of their great chance to remove their name from the bubble and earn their ticket to the dance.\u00a0 Congratulations to teams like San Diego State (who just upset ranked Nevada in the Mountain West to make the conference final against New Mexico) – the Aztecs are going from not even noticed on the bubble to one game away from dancing.<\/p>\n
It is going to be a great weekend of basketball as 19 conferences decide who their auto-bid will go to.\u00a0 Enjoy the great drama of\u00a0 Conference Championship Weekend!!!!\u00a0 And hopefully for all of you, at 6 pm EST on Sunday, your team will be one of the teams announced as the 68 teams with a chance to win the National Championship!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
14 conferences have their championship finals today and 5 more have their semi-finals.\u00a0 No game from the regular season means more than this weekend’s games – win one game today (or two if you are one of the 5 conferences playing Sunday) and you are invited to the NCAA Championship. At first, I didn’t like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2018-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1201"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1202,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201\/revisions\/1202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}