Have major college conference basketball tournies outlived usefulness?

That'd be an interesting tournament to see.

 

Yeah. It'd be like watching the Final Four in the 1950s.

 

Your 2013 Ivy League tournament champions.

 

Reminds me of that SNL skit where Michael Jordan is the first black Harlem Globetrotter. "I'm not gonna pass the ball to Blackie!"

 

This is why you play a regular season.

If you sit down in March and you're trying to make the argument that DePaul, Georgia, Virginia and Indiana need another chance to make the tournament, that defies any sense of logic and reason.

Conference tournaments never have been "useful" except to make some money for a few. Don't complain about the quality of the 65 teams in the tournament as long as you continue to select them based on what they do over three days. The tournament itself is terrific, but the NCAA deserves what it gets by picking the field so illogically.

 

For the same reason they don't allow football teams to participate in the I-AA tournament -- it would mean too much time away from the classroom. Or it might be a "Fiddler on the Roof" mentality -- TRADITION!

 

I agree that they've outlived their usefulness in determining who gets an automatic bid into the dance - it should be the regular season champion.
On the other hand they are fun to watch, provide a ton of excitement (like Syracuse-UConn 6OTs) and are a revenue source for the conferences. They also provide teams with one final chance to prove themselves worthy of a higher seed in the big dance than they might have gotten before the conference tournament began.

 

It can only be the regular season champion if every team in the conference plays the same schedule. That's not true in some cases.

 

Yes, oh yes, they have outgrown their usefulness. I've been saying this for years. Do away with them. Regular season champion moves on to the tournament. Done.
The Cinderella stories of some low-seeded team knocking off the preseason conference favorite in the league tourney makes for feel-good stories, but there can be enough of the highlight moments created during the regular season.
But hey, it's revenue for the conferences. No way they're going to be ditching 'em any time soon.

 

But say you have a team that's a seven- or eight-seed in the conference tournament - a Miami or a Michigan or a Providence - that has a few quality wins, a few ugly losses and a respectable record. At the end of the regular season, the team probably isn't guaranteed anything. But should that team prove to be better than its record and win a few games, it's earned the chance to do show what it can do in the NCAA tournament.

 

With those teams, sure. But with teams like St. Mary's -- which was whooping up on Gonzaga when Patty Mills broke his shooting hand in what became a loss -- a second chance is only fair when given the circumstances. Not every team needing a second chance sucks.