March has arrived, and for college sports fans, that means the best month of the year is here. March Madness might be the single most captivating sporting event, as it turns people who have not watched college basketball all year, into some of the biggest hoop heads out there. And while people love the storylines like Jack Gohlke lighting up Kentucky, or Saint Peter’s going on their run in the NCAA tournament, the madness starts even before then.
While the first weekend of the NCAA tournament is the king of the madness, conference tournaments are a close second. It is where the DJ Burns and the NC State’s of the world start their run, getting into the big dance, after they would have had no chance to make it based on their regular season performance. It is a good chance to watch certain mid-major teams and look for who could potentially be a Cinderella like UMBC or Fairleigh Dickinson. It is non-stop basketball from day to night for a week and a half straight even before the NCAA tournament.
March Madness is the perfect postseason that everyone is trying to replicate. In most pro sports, it is impossible due to the nature of seven-game series versus a single elimination tournament. While football is single elimination, to play a 64-team tournament would take double the time it would in basketball, due to football games only being played once a week. But conference tournaments on the other hand are something that I would think would be a lot more practical to install.
While the twelve-team playoff made a lot more regular season college football games matter, it made conference championship weekend a lot less meaningful, and brought about more hypotheticals about who should be in than the four-team playoff ever did. It made it tough to punish a team for losing their conference championship because they had to play an extra game that teams who finished behind them but were already in the playoff did not.
Super conferences of 16 and 18 teams also made it impossible for every team to play each other and resulted in some teams like Georgia and Ohio State having to play all the top dogs in their conference, while others like Texas and Penn State got easier draws. I think adding conference tournaments could help fix that problem.
Now I am not proposing that the SEC does a football tournament like their basketball tournament with the teams seeded 1-16 with double byes and all that, but more in a smaller format that has everyone playing the same amount of games. I also think conference tournaments are only necessary for conferences with 16+ teams, I think just a conference championship is still enough for smaller conferences, and most of the conferences under 16 are the group of five that only their conference champion would have a chance to make it anyway.
The Format
Any conference of 16 teams would have four tournaments of four teams. Conferences like the ACC and Big Ten with 17 and 18 might have to get a bit more creative with some tournaments only having three teams, or just do what they are doing for basketball where not every team makes the conference tournament.
These tournaments would take place with the first round being what is currently conference championship weekend, and the second round being Army-Navy week. I know that may be a controversial take to some, to not have Army-Navy on its own weekend, but I think that game being after the selections for the playoff is announced turns it into an exhibition game, so having it before the playoff selection gives it more meaning in my mind.
Teams 1-4 in conference standings would play in the conference championship bracket, teams 5-8 would play in the 5th place bracket, teams 9-12 would play for 9th place, and teams 13-16 would play for 13th place. The bottom half of the conference brackets would be more for giving teams an extra opportunity to reach the wins threshold for postseason play, but do not necessarily need to take place. The winners of the two semi-finals in the championship bracket would play for the conference championship, and the losers would play in the third place game. In the 5th place bracket, the winners would play for fifth, and the losers play for seventh.
Now you might be wondering why the consolation games are necessary, but I think it is a solution to the problem earlier, as now everyone is playing on conference championship weekend. SEC fans were clamoring for Alabama or Ole Miss to jump over an SMU, but that would not have been fair to the Mustangs, as those two teams were sitting at home that weekend. However, if Alabama and Tennessee were playing for third place in the SEC that weekend, and the Crimson Tide picked up a win, it would have been easier to have real reasoning why the third and fourth place teams in the SEC were better than the 2nd place team in the ACC.
The Quad System
As previously mentioned, balanced scheduling is a big issue for these conferences now that they have so many teams. While removing divisions made sure no one got screwed out of a chance to play for a conference championship by having it be the two best teams record wise, it made it even more difficult for teams to play similar opponents. While I think getting rid of divisions was a good idea, I personally would bring them back, but with four quads rather than two divisions.
Having four quads would make this conference tournament even easier to put in place, similar to how the two division winners would play in the conference championship game, the four quad winners would play in the conference championship bracket, all the second place teams would play in the 5th place bracket, and so on.
It would also make it easier to have balanced scheduling even before the conference tournament. The four quads could use the NFL scheduling format where everyone plays each team in their quad, and then the team that finished the same place in their quad the previous season. The last two or three conference games could be a rotation between playing everyone in a different quad or protected rivals that are not in the same quad that you would play every year, the Iron Bowl and Egg Bowl, for example, if those schools were not in the same quad.
Group of Five Format
Currently, all Group of Five conferences sit at 14 teams or less, so I would not add conference tournaments for any of them. The American and Sun Belt are leagues that I see getting up to 16 teams if Conference USA folds, so they could need to add the conference tournament in the future, but for now the current conference championship format works for them. Rather than adding a conference tournament, I would have the Group of Five conferences add a different feature from college basketball.
While it no longer exists, college basketball used to have the bracket buster games where ESPN would pit two mid-major schools with tournament aspirations against each other to give them a chance to boost their tournament resume. It gave teams like VCU, Wichita State, and George Mason a chance to face another high-level mid-major from another conference and gain some more national recognition before they went on their eventual tournament run.
I think if the Group of Five Conferences kept their conference championship games the week they are now, they could have these bracket-buster type games the following week while the power conferences have their championships. Imagine a game between Boise State and Tulane where the winner was almost certainly guaranteed the Group of Five spot in the playoff. These games would act as essentially another playoff game and would be must-see TV in my opinion.
