Skill or Luck? - Brian

College basketball could be one of the most exciting sports in my eyes. It combines skill, intensity, and the desire to win, along with the fact that anyone can beat anyone (see South Carolina beating Kentucky, and then struggling to win ever since).

But there is one large flaw that college basketball has. And that is the fact that the automatic bid to the NCAA tournament comes not from the regular season champions, but from the conference tournament champions.

This is incredibly flawed because of a simple scenario like this:

Team A and Team B both play for "one-bid" conference (meaning that they aren't a very strong conference, so only the winner of the automatic bid will make it - true for about half of the D-I conferences).

Team A finishes 23-7 with a 17-0 conference record. Team B finishes 14-16 with a 5-12 conference record. Clearly Team A deserves the automatic bid, right? But Team B plays very good for the 4 days of the conference tournament, and ends up winning. This means Team B makes it to the NCAA tournament, and Team A stays home. Huh?

Doesn't make much sense to me. The team who plays better for the entire season should win the bid, not the fluke team who plays well for 4 days. This happens more often than you think, and it allows terrible teams into the tournament (which, by the way, is supposed to be the BEST 65 teams, not the best 60 and the luckiest 5).

It even happens in "power" conferences. In 2008, Georgia won the SEC tournament and automatically qualified for the tournament. Their record that year? 13-16, with a 4-12 tournament record. This means that they also pushed a bubble team out of the tournament field.

So who would you rather have in the tournament - The 13-16 Bulldogs who got lucky, or the 26-4 mid-major team who played well all year, but lost their conference tournament, and got pushed out of the field of 65 because of Georgia?