The college basketball regular season feels meaningless
I used to be a huge fan of college basketball.
Then I covered college basketball. And I realized that the regular season barely matters.
In 2012, I covered the Mizzou Tigers as they went 30–4 and won the Big 12 Tournament championship. Their reward? A neutral-site first-round NCAA Tournament game in a gym mostly full of fans rooting against them. (They lost to Norfolk State in one of the biggest upsets of all time.)
What did they gain by winning 30 games and winning the Big 12 title that they wouldn’t have gained by only winning 20 games and losing in the Big 12 semifinals? Almost nothing. They still would have played a first-round NCAA Tournament game on a neutral court.
In 2014, I covered the FGCU Eagles as they went 22–12, won the ASUN regular season title and reached the conference championship game. Their reward? Because they lost to Mercer in that championship game, they got a consolation prize to go play in the NIT.
What did they gain by winning 22 games that they wouldn’t have gained by winning 10? Not much. In a low-level conference, the only way to make the NCAA Tournament is to win a conference tournament. The regular season basically consists of four months of exhibitions to get ready for a one-week conference tournament.
I look back on both of those seasons as a big waste of my time. All those regular season games I covered barely mattered. I should have just taken four months off and shown up in March.
These days, I find it tough to get invested until the Big Dance starts. College basketball has arguably the best postseason tournament in the world, but it has unarguably the worst regular season.
There are ways, though, to make the regular season matter more without damaging the NCAA Tournament.
Play NCAA Tournament games on campus
Take a look at the NBA playoffs, and you’ll see that the top teams are rewarded for their regular-season success by being given home-court advantage in the postseason.
The chance to earn home-court advantage adds meaning to games that teams play even after they’ve locked up a spot in the playoffs.
I’ve never understood why no NCAA Tournament games are played on campus. Why doesn’t the most-esteemed college basketball tournament in the world showcase the tremendous home-court environments of Duke, Kansas, Maryland and countless others?
Instead, every game is played at a neutral site in a large, often empty, arena. There’s no advantage to gain by winning 30 games instead of 20.
When Mizzou lost to Norfolk State, the CHI Health Center in Omaha looked less than half full at tip-off.
It started to fill up in the second half as Kansas fans, in town to see the Jayhawks play later in the day, filed in to root against Mizzou. Florida fans and Virginia fans, still in the arena after watching their teams play in the earlier game on the same court, joined in to root for the underdog.
That afternoon in Omaha, the neutral site didn’t even feel that neutral. Late in the second half, it felt more like a Norfolk State home game.
But if the first several rounds were played on campus, with the better seeds hosting each game, regular season games would carry a whole lot more weight. A couple wins during the regular season could mean the difference between playing tournament games at home in front of your own screaming fans or playing them on the road in front of someone else’s.
It’s hard to see Mizzou losing to Norfolk State in Mizzou Arena. You never know what could happen, but 30 wins should have earned the Tigers that advantage.
Even if every game couldn’t be played on campus, the men’s tournament could improve by adopting the model used in the women’s tournament. In that tournament, the top 4 seeds in each region host the first two rounds in their subset of the bracket. That format rewards the top 16 teams in the country, which makes women’s regular season games feel much more important.
Quick tangent
I’ll get back to how the men’s basketball regular season could be improved in a second, but I want to go on a quick tangent about something else the men’s game needs to adopt from the women’s game.
In 2015, the women’s game switched from 20-minute halves (still used by the men’s game) to 10-minute quarters. With that, the bonus rules were changed. Rather than team fouls resetting each half, they reset each quarter. When teams reach five fouls in a quarter, the opposing team goes straight into the double bonus. There are no 1-and-1s.
Watch a women’s game, and you’ll see that this format keeps the game moving a lot better. Way less of the game is played in the bonus. (Also, there’s one fewer TV timeout in each half.)
Oh, and did I mention that there are no 1-and-1s? That’s the absolute best part of the women’s game. In the men’s game, 1-and-1s tend to reward the team committing too many fouls more than they reward the team being fouled. That paradox doesn’t exist in the women’s game.
Expand the field?
OK, let’s get back on track here.
Playing tournament games on campus would add meaning to regular season games for power conference teams in the mix for a top seed. But something also needs to be done to add meaning to the regular season for teams in low-level conferences.
Since 2005, regular-season conference champions that don’t win their conference tournament and aren’t selected to the NCAA Tournament are awarded automatic bids to the NIT. It’s a nice consolation prize, but it doesn’t do much to add meaning to the regular season.
So let’s take that one step further and grant those teams automatic bids to the NCAA Tournament. A 10-week conference regular season should count for just as much, or more, than a one-week conference tournament.
Now, there’s one major flaw with this idea: It would incentive conferences to make sure their regular season champions lose in the conference tournament so that two teams reach the NCAA Tournament. Conferences are awarded about $280,000 for each team that reaches the NCAA Tournament.
There’s no great answer to this problem.
But here’s a possibility: Give two automatic bids to each conference and expand the field to 80 teams.
Wait, expand the field? Wouldn’t that make the regular season mean even less?
In this case, it actually wouldn’t. With 64 of the 80 teams qualifying by automatic bid, there would only be 16 at-large bids up for grabs, a big drop from the current 36 at-large bids.
With fewer at-large bids available, that would juice up the importance of regular season games in conferences that typically send a bunch of teams to the tournament.
Perhaps it’s time to expand the field anyway. When the tournament was expanded to 64 teams in 1985, there were 288 Division I teams. Now there are 357, with more on the way.
These are just a couple ideas. But really, I’m here for any ideas that would get me excited to watch college basketball again before mid-March. What would you do to fix the regular season?
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