Something that bothers sports fans, now and then, is that the best team doesn’t always win. This is usually part of the charm. Upsets can happen. Little guys can come out on top. At times, though, it reaches a point where the legitimacy of a competition gets questioned. At times, the question is asked: Is this too random?
This is a big risk for baseball, and one of the reasons MLB playoff expansion is concerning. It’s a risk with college football playoff expansion as well. It’s already a problem for the NBA, but in a twisted way—in the NBA, the regular season largely doesn’t matter now.
Most of the time, the NCAA Tournament dodges even being questioned on this front. That isn’t happening this year.
The great strength of the NCAA Tournament is that it combines 1) an environment where anything can happen with 2) a sport where there’s usually not much clarity on who the best teams are and 3) a track record of good teams usually winning it all. This is part of why filling out brackets is so much fun. There’s enough uncertainty for the best teams to lose, but usually, one of the best teams wins in the end. Even in 2015, when a historically successful Kentucky team went down to Wisconsin who went down to Duke in the Final Four, it was easy to call Duke the best team. They’d done enough over the full season to merit that title. So has almost every champion in recent memory, with the lone clear exception being Shabazz Napier’s UConn.
You could make a case for each of this year’s possible eventual champions as the best team in the sport. UConn is ranked 1st in the country on KenPom. San Diego State and Florida Atlantic have each won upwards of thirty times and won their respective mid-major conferences by multiple games. Miami has nearly won thirty games and won the ACC, the worst power conference this year (by a lot) but a league powerful enough to garner some respect. For each of the four, you could make a case. But aside from UConn—and maybe UConn wins this and renders the question irrelevant—it’s not the strongest case out there. Put any of these teams against UCLA, or put it in rematches against Houston or Alabama, and they’d be an underdog by more than a single possession. That doesn’t mean they’d lose, but…play the game enough times, and they’d lose most of them. They aren’t the best teams. But at the same time, that’s ok.
It’s hard to have a perfect playoff format. It’s especially hard in a sport with high game-to-game inconsistency. What’s just, then, is keeping the playoff format consistent. Don’t move the goalposts. Make teams figure out how to win in the format they’re tasked with playing. We’ve seen teams adjust this way in baseball: Think of Theo Epstein overpaying by every imaginable measure of price for Aroldis Chapman in 2016. We’ve seen teams adjust this way in college football: Think of teams like Clemson, during their run, who seemed to figure out how to play their absolute best at the end of the season. We’re likely seeing it in college basketball, as sports get smarter across the board. It’s possible it’s no coincidence Miami chose to target guards rather than big men with their massive NIL outreach effort last offseason, knowing guards can raise your single-game floor more than a dominant guy in the middle.
Is the NCAA Tournament the best format out there for determining the sport’s true best team? Of course not. But it does a good enough job, and it’s loved enough, that it usually gets away with it. Now, it’s on teams to adjust.
The ACC Thing
A lot of ACC fans are jumping around over Miami’s admittance to the Final Four, and…ok? Is the ACC’s argument that it’s on par with Conference USA? It’s silly, and it’s more annoying than when fans at South Carolina and schools like that draft off the football success of Alabama and Georgia. It’s one thing when the thing being argued—that your conference is the best—is actually true.
The Creighton Ending
I don’t have a problem with out of bounds reviews late in college basketball games. They’re usually very clear, and they’re often highly consequential. I hate most clock reviews. Changing the clock by 1.5 seconds when there are 45 seconds left isn’t going to make a difference in the outcome of the game. Players will adjust. There are too many reviews right now, and they take too long, and these are the easiest to cut out.
What about clock reviews when the clock is running out, though? Like the one in yesterday’s San Diego State triumph?
Generally, these are probably good. When a material change is happening, check the tape. But as Ken Pomeroy pointed out emphatically on Twitter, checking whether the clock started at the right time—unless it’s egregious—is silly. When the clock ends is one thing, but when the clock starts? If it hinges on a few tenths of a second? The clock cannot physically start at the right time. Humans are not that fast. Unless you’re going to somehow link sensors on the ball to the clock, changing the rules within the last seconds of games is silly. The stopwatch should only be used in extreme circumstances. Yesterday’s wasn’t extreme, and it led to a weird, confusing, disappointing ending. It didn’t change the outcome of the game, in all probability—it was still going to be San Diego State ball—but it was a bad enforcement of a bad approach to the rules.
Rodney Terry Got the Job
Texas is hiring Rodney Terry to the full-time job, and it’s puzzling, but whatever. Texas can do what they want. Since he’s sticking around, though, one thought on his comments criticizing Iowa State fans for booing Tyrese Hunter at Texas’s first weekend games in Des Moines:
I was hoping to never address this, because I think it’s dumb, and I thought Terry would be out of our lives after yesterday anyway. But since he isn’t: Get over it, Rod. I think I’m among the louder Tyrese Hunter supporters among Iowa State fans, but at this point, the booing is happening, and it doesn’t seem like Hunter minds. His own response was much more reasonable than Terry’s. It’s sports! This isn’t day-to-day life. Death threats and personal contact and legitimate verbal abuse are obviously not ok, but let fans hate players. Everyone will be ok.
Utah State vs. South Florida
South Florida is evidently heavily courting Ryan Odom, and that is a wild sentence to write as someone fairly up to speed on mid-major basketball. Utah State is one of the most successful mid-major programs out there, and the success predates Odom. South Florida must have the boosters, though. A fascinating development to watch.
Christopher Morel to AAA
We’ll have more Cubs content and MLB content at large over the next few days, but a quick note on the North Siders: Christopher Morel will start the year in Des Moines. It’s a good idea, and it shouldn’t be viewed as a poor reflection on what the Cubs think of him. Tasked with the question of whether to either push him into a full-season MLB starting role, cut short his playing time in the name of competition, or invest in him for the long haul, the Cubs chose investment. The guy is still only 23. This gives him some space in which to develop while also testing out Nick Madrigal and Miles Mastrobuoni, each of whom could believably be something and has a lot less developmental time ahead of them.
Also of note: The Cubs traded Zach McKinstry to the Tigers for a minor league reliever. And with that, the infield is pretty much complete.
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More on just about everything tomorrow (the whole world, so get ready for the section on hotel conference room carpet patterns), and no bets today but we’ll have our hedging approach figure out re: Utah Valley come tomorrow as well. See you there.
