Hoop Fan wrote:So you don't like the playoff/tournament concept at all? The seeding process usually rewards the top teams with a much easier path in the tournament. What you say about that Butler team is true, some bad midseason losses, but they also beat the #1 #2 and #4 seeds in their region just to make the Final Four. Thats a tough road. And the following year when Gordon Heyward missed that shot at the buzzer to beat Duke, they were very worthy of being in that champ game. Just saying how will you ever have a perfect way of ensuring the most talented team wins every championship? is that even what you want? i want the team that puts it all together and rises to the challenge of the big moment and handles the ultimate pressure to be called champs.
Last thing i would say is home field/court, and scheduling, is too a big a factor in regular season matchups. You only really have a true comparison when games are played on a nuetral field.
For football there is no perfect solution because you just can't play enough games.
For basketball it's easy though.
You play the regular season as is, including conference tournaments. You have a poll system crown a national champion. Top teams will have to schedule non-conference games against each other if they want to win it. You will have to have marquee wins to set yourself apart at the top.
Then in March/April, you play the NCAA tournament with
every team in the nation involved. Before anybody cries about extending the season... this would only add 2 rounds to the existing tournament. You still have the play-in round on a Tuesday at campus sites, it would just be much larger (currently you would have 95 games in this round). Then you have the rounds of 256 and 128 on Thursday-Sunday, and then after that you are down to the same 64 team tournament we are used to. It adds all of 1 week (2 games) to the season. The ranking committee probably won't want to seed 351 teams, so they could just seed the top 64 or 100 or something, and then apply RPI after that. Done. The winner is crowned NCAA Tournament Champions.
Now everyone can be happy. You have a season champion, the best team wire-to-wire. You have a tournament champion, the team that "rises to the challenge of the big moment" as you said. Nobody gets "snubbed" by the selection committee and excluded from the tournament. And at the same time, a team that goes 30-3 in the regular season doesn't lose everything when they slip up against some mid-major playing a wacky style and having a hot 3-point shooting day. If you want a little extra drama, you can even schedule an annual tip-off game between the previous season's champion and the tournament winner.