Consecutive Appearances and a Question for Readers
Picked up a tidbit while in College Park earlier today working on a story on Will Dalton for Saturday's paper.
Maryland Coach Dave Cottle noted that after Johns Hopkins's 37 consecutive appearances in the NCAA tournament, the next-highest team has six. (Maryland.) Cornell and Navy are next; each has five straight appearances.
The fallout from the end of Georgetown's 11-year NCAA streak--in a year in which Georgetown defeated No. 1 Duke and Navy, which received an at-large bid to the tournament--has included calls for conference tournaments not to count toward teams' regular season data or to be eliminated entirely.
The argument against every conference having a tournament comes from an example like the Patriot League. That seven-team league has a four-team tournament. So what happens to the three teams that don't make the tournament? That's a weekend where they can't schedule games. But if they don't finish in the top four, it's an unwanted bye week late in the season.
How should lacrosse deal with this issue? Should a weekend late in the regular season be reserved for conference championship games only, a la college football's model? What would the other teams do? Quint Kessenich proposed a model a few years ago whereby instead of conference tournaments, there would be an early-season equivalent where the No. 1 team from the ACC (preseason voting) would play the No. 1 team from, say, the GWLL. Then the No. 2 teams would play each other. Etc. Is that tenable?
I'll get this one started: I'm not a fan of conference tournaments. I would be if there were a weekend after the regular season and before the NCAA tournament that could be reserved for tournaments.
But with Memorial Day being so locked in and so perfect for the Final Four, I can't see that plan working. Lacrosse should be measured against football, not basketball. I'd like to see the sport keep more in tune with football models (one game a week, two at most) rather than adopting some basketball-like tendencies (tournaments, three games a week).
By Christian Swezey |
May 7, 2008; 5:45 PM ET
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Posted by: berger | May 7, 2008 8:42 PM
If Lafayette wins more games, someone else is left with a weekend in nice weather without a game. Conference tournaments are useless. When Duke went to UVa for the regular season, more than 8,000 people attended. Same teams, same venue, ACC championship, seemingly a more important game, and the crowd was 3,400.
Posted by: Christian | May 7, 2008 8:49 PM
Conference tournaments are only useless if they don't result in an automatic bid (like the ACC). "Seemingly more important game" is wrong - it wasn't any more important than the regular season matchup, because the ACC tournament does not result in an automatic bid into the NCAA Tournament. End-of-season conference tournaments make regular season conference games more exciting, especially when not everyone in the league gets a bid into the conference tournament.
Woe is Georgetown. I mean, they did get screwed, but really, had they beaten Loyola like they should have, would this be a question?
I echo the comment above. Who cares if the bottom three teams from the PL get an extra game? That certainly wouldn't help other teams to improve their strength of schedule to play the bottom-feeders in the PL (or any other league).
Posted by: Incredulous | May 8, 2008 6:50 AM
A few points, not all of which are responsive to the post:
First, most of the conference tournaments now take place on the last weekend of the regular season; only the Patriot and the ACC, I think, hold theirs before then. I could certainly imagine ESPN-U ginning up a "tournament weekend" much as it does in basketball that would push all of the tournies to the last weekend of the year with the possible exception of the ACC, whose teams would probably want a week to recover before the playoffs start. The Big East might follow that pattern.
Second, people have complained about the tournies' effect on NCAA selection for many years, back to when the ACC was the only conference to hold a tournament. Duke in effect got a bid to the NCAAs for winning the ACC tourney in 2002, knocking out a Hofstra team that was ranked 4 or 5 at the time. The same thing happened, I think, in 1995, when Duke then lost to Notre Dame in the first round.
But with almost every conference now having a tournament, and the Ivies and the ECAC having an automatic bid, that "Duke" effect should have been muted. To check that hypothesis, you could run the RPI with and without tournaments; you could even, this year, throw in a mock "ECAC tournament." Assume G-town beats Loyola regular season and Loyola wins the tournament, getting the automatic bid. Would G-town have then been more likely to win an at-large bid?
Posted by: David Marcus | May 8, 2008 7:23 AM
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I don't follow you. Who cares if Lafayette has a bye week? If they don't like it they need to win more games.
What's the problem here?