OT: Gonzaga and BYU may opt out of conference tournament
- Thread starter HOF Coach
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It would be bigger headlines if they decided to play. It would be stupid to. And the WCCT champ absolutely should get an auto bid.
The selection should just put and end to this opting out crap immediately. Just simply release a statement saying, any team who chooses not to participate in their league sanctioned tournament will not be considered for NCAA Tournament.
Agreed completely. This sets up a horrible precedent that will destroy the NCAAT. The thrill of the conference tournaments and the do or die approach in the weeks leading up to the NCAAT is half the fun.
Do you know how stupid that sounds? No school is obligated to play in their conference tournament, especially during a pandemic.
You cannot make them play. However, you can absolutely say that the winner of the watered down WCC tourney is not guaranteed an NCAA auto bid.
No you absolutely cannot. Each conference gets to choose how they will award their auto bid. The WCC gives their tournament champion the auto bid. It doesn't matter who does or doesn't play in it, the tournament champion will get the auto bid.
I'd tell everyone that if they opt out of their conference tournament they are going to get the worst seed in their "category". Gonzaga and BYU opt out and St. Mary's wins the tournament? That's great. Three teams in. St. Mary's plays in one of the 16 seed first four games, and Gonzaga and BYU play in the two first four games for the worst at large teams.
Gonzaga might not care, but I'll bet BYU would.
Not sure if you were saying this or not, but why not take it a step further and have BYU and Gonzaga play each other in one of the first four games.
I 100 percent know how stupid it sounds. Conference tournaments are meaningless for 65-75 percent of teams anyway.
However, do you know how stupid it sounds to say no team is obligated to play in their conference tournament when zero have opted out in the prior 45 years?! Corona is a serious issue but If these schools can travel around the country playing regular season games they sure as hell can travel to a singular location for a week and play.
If BYUand Gonzaga says ya know what, let’s pack it in call it a year we will see everyone in Indianapolis, Drop them two seed lines and we will never see anything like this again.
CBB had a lot of problems right now, with the addition of NET we’re seeing teams with sub 500 records in contention on the bubble, because they’ve played a “tough schedule.” The regular season is being devalued, if we start devaluing the conference tournament like this... well let’s just pack it in, go full college football, hand out bids whomever is gonna sell the most tickets in that pod gets a bid and move on.
What does the pandemic have to do with it? Why is this any different than any other year?
If a team doesn't value winning it's conference championship, and lets face it, if you are in the WCC there really is no prestige in winning that conference, then you should always opt out if the NCAA lets you still go to the dance. You don't risk injury, and you get more money into your conference. I'm surprised they didn't think of this earlier.
Teamrankings has the WCC as the 4th best conference in the country, one spot ahead of the ACC. Sagarin has them 8th, which seems a little more accurate.
Either way it can be argued the WCC is the best conference outside of the Power 6, so I would say there would be some prestige in winning it. Not so much if you didn’t have to go through Gonzaga and BYU obviously.
So what. The NCAA has lawyers too and if it can’t take a punch then maybe it doesn’t deserve to be leader of the pack. Welcome to the big leagues.
Conference tournaments are not required by the NCAA. They leave it up to the conference to crown their champion. The NCAA cannot force anyone to play in their conference tournament under any circumstances. What they can potentially do is pass some rule that states that your conference tournament must have a certain number of teams to award an auto bid otherwise the auto bid goes to the regular season champion. Or they can pass a rule that states a league can only award an auto bid to the tournament champion if the regular season champion participates.
One thing that isn't mentioned in this thread is that the WCC tournament is heavily skewed so that the regular season champion will win the event. The top two seeds get byes all the way into the semi-finals.
The top two teams sitting out the event doesn't just ensure a third, auto-bid, it means that auto-bid is potentially coming to a third- or fourth-place team only needing to win two games to do it.
Obviously it makes sense during this pandemic that NCAA locks might want to avoid unnecessary exposures that could derail their NCAAT hopes. What is risky here is that conference tournaments could be reconfigured in the future to make it more likely for leagues to construct a conference tournament format to maximize the number of bids (which means $) the conference will get. Why would Gonzaga ever want to play the WCC tournament?
Well, the only conference where this really would ever come into play is the WCC. Lets say Murray State goes 28-3 and decides to skip the OVC next year. Would they really be an absolute lock? I cant see a team like that skipping.
The easiest thing to do would be to pass a rule that the auto bid has to go to the regular season champion unless the regular season champion decides to play in the conference tournament. Now, lets say a team tries to take advantage of this like say Liberty wins the A-Sun regular season but decides to skip the A-Sun tournament (post-COVID) so they can get the auto bid. Well, they CAN but the A-Suncm can sanction them on their own for doing so like giving them no home games the following season or something like that
You're saying this under the impression that almost any good team also cares about winning their conference tournament. Why does UVa need to play in the ACC tournament?
Houston has a 3-game lead in the American. I think Loyola Chicago is a lock (Kenpom #9). San Diego St is pretty safely in despite being 4th in the MWC. Any of those conferences would benefit from having their auto-bid go to someone else, especially in a year with no fans and no home-region advantage.
Houston in particular is projected as a 2-seed and only has 3 NCAAT appearances in the last 20+ years. They have even more reason to opt-out than Gonzaga does.
UVa would be stupid to play in the ACCT this year. Post-Covid, they would absolutely play for 2 reasons:
- the ACC won't let them skip
- winning the ACCT is a great accomplishment
Loyola - if they are a lock, then yes, sit but its very rare that an MVC team is a lock
Houston/SD State - they should sit but those usually arent 1 bid leagues so its likely those tourney champions were going anyway
I think if teams voluntarily opt out the NCAA should have to force the conference to give the auto-bid to the regular conference season champion. The NCAA would have full rights to do that since they are holding the tournament. Make the conferences have to deal with their members.
Right. The only thing the NCAA could do is say “sorry Gonzaga, you didn’t play and someone else got the conference’s auto-bid that wouldn’t have if you played in it” and not give Gonzaga an at-large bid.
Would they do that with the #1 team in the country? I doubt it. But this could be a mess if every conference has opt-outs and wanting more teams from their conference in, decides to give their auto bid to the tourney champ still.
I really hope this never becomes a huge issue. Maybe not in the WCC, but most major conference teams seem to still take a good bit of pride in winning their Conference Tournament and consider it a goal/achievement.
Again, this is so stupid. There is no requirement that a team has to play in a conference tournament. The idea that the NCAA is going to slide that rule in during a pandemic is possibly the dumbest thing I've ever heard on this board.
Conferences get to choose how they award their auto bid, not the NCAA. If the NCAA wants to make sweeping changes to the auto bid process, its going to have to post-COVID.
For years I have said that traditional 1 bid leagues should award their auto bid to the winner of a game between their regular season champion and their tournament champion. Yea, it takes some of the drama out of a tournament championship game but I am sick of seeing some 5 seed with an 18-16 record because the 25-9 1 seed got upset.
Let's not forget that during conference realignment, the "Big 12" decided not to backfill teams and gave up their football conference championship so that they could potentially push more than one team into the BCS/CFP. That is far more egregious of a strategy than messing with a WCC basketball tournament.
Winning the Big East tourney was incredibly meaningful. Winning an ACC tourney would be the same. But I understand what you are saying, those tourney's are really only important to those teams involved. Nationally, they don't matter than much anymore except obviously for the single bids.
And on that note, is it any more of a travesty than say have a 26 win Winthrop team be upset in their conference tourny and a 15-16 High Point win the tourney and get the bid. If you set this precedence and example, why should Winthrop play in its conference tourney and risk everything? Because the above scenario has happened more than a few times with the one bids.
There were Pitt fans every year in the 2000s arguing that advancing in the Big East tournament was a waste of time and energy and that Pitt should just lose early and refocus for the NCAA tournament because that is all that matters.
There were 8 of those fans. Winning the BE Tournament is extremely meaningful.
This was Ron Cook's position too I think. If one truly believes the only successful season is an NCAA tournament victory, then why do we even watch the games, even in a season like this? I mean we know we're not going to win it all. Weird mentality out there.
The main thing I want as a fan is some good memories. The Big East tournament provided some great ones.
I'm not saying it was sensible, but it was a common enough talking point that it was in the papers and talk radio every year.
Do you think Houston has some deep-rooted affinity to win the American conference tournament? Does winning yet another WCC title matter at all to Gonzaga? It's easy to say that the BE or ACC teams care about these, but as I pointed out already, the B12 cared so little about their football title that they eliminated it. It was only after their conspiracy blew up in their faces with their "co-champions" both getting shafted that they changed their minds.
Like 12, including Bob Smizik. And I don't think those "fans" followed Pitt basketball until they "filled out dere brackits an' at".
Bzzt. It was Smizik. Ron Cook has said and still says his favorite sporting event of all time to cover was the Big East tourney. So....this one's not on Cookie.
This is an unconventional year so why not have an unconventional tournament. It’s going to be a disaster anyways because no way 64 invited teams all get to the starting post unscathed. There will be cancellations during the first and second rounds and bitching about it isn’t going to change the fact that some teams will benefit from that and other teams will not.
I won’t be watching because I have no interest in any of the National power schools this year and don’t know anything about the smaller conferences. Good luck NCAA with your golden goose and the NIT thing a ma jig also.
I won’t be watching because I have no interest in any of the National power schools this year and don’t know anything about the smaller conferences. Good luck NCAA with your golden goose and the NIT thing a ma jig also.
That was not what I was thinking, but I like that even better. Have them play in to get to the real part of the tournament.
