First: I’m back, and reasonably happy to be, from a week’s vacation. Nothing to add, really.
As to the Dance, I find it interesting that the debate over who’s in and out starts with a goes-without-saying assumption, which is that creating the strongest field possible is the only thing that can or should matter. I’m sure that nothing otherwise has ever occured to Digger and Jay and Hubert and the boys.
I believe strongest-field-possible should be one of two major guiding, and sometimes conflicting, ideas, the other being rewarding teams for having had great (or even good) seasons.
Bilas, who is strongly pro-BCS conference and strongly pro-strongest-field-possible, said no college sport gives as much of a break to the little guy as basketball. Hoops certainly is better in this regard than football, but that’s a bad example, since football has no championship and roughly a third as many D-1 teams as basketball.
The NCAA holds a lot of national championships in a lot of sports at a lot of levels, and I promise you that D-1 basketball is the only one in which the fifth-best team in the fourth-or-fifth best league thus qualifies to play in a tournament for the national title.
I’m talking about Arizona, which lost 40 percent of its games, including five of its last six, finished in the middle of the pack, at 9-9, in a less-than-great league, and had national media folk, last week, claiming it’d be a miscarriage of justice if they didn’t get to play for the national championship.
I find it bizarre that Arizona was even in the discussion. To me, the Wildcats not only weren’t on the bubble, they weren’t in the bubble’s area code.
If Arizona’s dancing, what’s the regular season for? The ESPN crew’s argument (they were not unanimous, I should point out; Doug Gottlieb and Dickey V felt Arizona should be out) was that Arizona would be favored if they played, say, St. Mary’s today on a neutral court.
First of all, I’m not sure that’s true. How can you be sure a team that lost five of its last six against good-but-not-great competition would be a clear favorite right now against anybody?
But even if it is true, so what? That’s something for Arizona’s players to rue while they contemplate screwing up their season. The New England Patriots would have been favored against several of the teams that made the NFL playoffs last year. Is that an indictment of the NFL playoff format?
The good news is this will all be forgotten in two days, when the games start.
