A grand bargain for NCAA Tournament selection — Karen Aston talks UTSA hoops

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This week, the debate over conference tournaments and the power they hold sparked anew. Several teams completed elite regular seasons with conference titles, only to lose in their conference tournaments. Below, I spoke at length about this with Karen Aston, head coach at UTSA, but hers is by no means the only team to suffer such a loss — James Madison and UNLV are also in that category this year already.

This is not new. Every year, there are so-called “bid-stealers”. And the result, every time it happens, is that a team which has done everything asked of it for approximately 98 percent of its season — winning the conference it is in — loses out on the biggest March reward over 40 minutes of play.

It seems crazy to me. It has always seemed crazy to me. In every other respect, the NCAA is meticulous about weighing a team’s entire body of work. But also, there’s this back door into the NCAA Tournament, no matter how terrible your regular season was, if you can win, say, three games in 72 hours.

Let’s be clear, though: sports is also intended to be fun, and my goodness, how I love conference tournaments. What a delight it is to see teams who have struggled all year get it together, find themselves and defy the odds. It is magical.

Naturally, Kim Mulkey wants to do away with the whole thing. She’s also opposed to reporters eating after we file. We don’t need to listen to Kim Mulkey on this.

But conferences wouldn’t listen to this, either, because conference tournaments make a lot of money, due in large part to the magic of an NCAA bid as a prize for the winner. There’s a reason even the Ivy League, after a long tradition of playing without one, bowed to the reality of Ivy Madness. (And it’s great, by the way! Our Jenn Hatfield will be covering it at The Next.) But as you’ll likely remember, it almost kept a Columbia team that was clearly deserving out of the NCAA field last season.

Here’s how I’d solve this problem: two pathways to an auto bid.

Seriously, how easy is that?

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We’ve already seen the movement to reward regular season champions lead to those teams earning an auto bid to the WNIT, back in 2007, and though the men have moved away from this model recently, there’s no need to follow them — these are the people who play 20-minutes halves! My plan takes the achievement that essentially any coach or player would tell you is the more impressive one, the one more reflective of a team’s true season — a four-month run of excellence, rather than 3-4 days of it — and simply weighs it equally to the magic of the conference tournament run.

If you want the cynical financial argument for it: it turns the vital regular season games into bigger draws, too.

And where does that leave the rest of the field? Absolutely, it will lead to fewer at-large bids. But instead of using the argument “you should have won your conference tournament” against regular season champions, the argument becomes: “You had three ways to qualify for the NCAA Tournament. You didn’t win your conference, you didn’t win your conference tournament, and your resume wasn’t good enough, either.”

Moreover, the teams who will be most affected by this are high-major teams. And they have a remedy — schedule better out of conference. I beg you, the next time you complain that an overachieving mid-major simply needed to schedule better, take five minutes to talk to a coach of a mid-major, off the record, and ask about all the teams who refuse to play them every year. It’s simply not a problem these coaches can solve individually. It needs to happen systematically.

There are plenty of other variables involved in this process, and that will never change. Anytime there is a selection committee, individual human choices are going to lead to weighing different evidence in various ways, and even the NET rating is something of a controversial product itself.

But the NCAA selection committee takes this process very seriously, and I am comfortable with the idea that there will be a human element to these decisions. I don’t think I can find that same comfort with rewarding teams who go on 96-hour runs for the ages at the expense of teams who have achieved at an elite level all season.

And moreover, I don’t think there’s any reason to do so. Take them both for the NCAA Tournament. And let the rest of the at-large pool battle it out. We’ll still see tears. But they won’t come from teams who performed, all season, the way postseason-worthy teams should.

This week in women’s basketball

Just going to point you to The Next this week — not because there aren’t a ton of great stories being written around the women’s basketball media space, but because our staff has written 40 such stories, in-person at critical tournaments across the country, since March 8. 40!

Also delighted to announce that our team at The Next will be part of the Amazon Fire TV NCAA Tournament studio show! More about the cast of analysts and where to watch it here.

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Five at The IX: Karen Aston, UTSA

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