The NCAA, between it's own existential questions and the fact that Coach Calipari is preparing to take "Succeed and Proceed" to the ultimate level (I'll get to the latter in a moment...), has made a statement: They have probably chosen this tournament as their hill to die on.
They took a UCLA team, a very ordinary and average UCLA team over a Colorado State team which was ranked #29 in real-time RPI.
UCLA? In the FIFTIES.
Why? John Wooden, UCLA's rep, and a major conference.
And unless Colorado State wants to get in a major conference of some kind, they will have to win their one-bid tournament to get in.
By the way, that #29 is the highest-ever RPI denied a trip to the tournament in the 64-68 team era.
Now here's a worse one that shows that college basketball is trending toward the few and monied: Yale.
Yale needed one win last week to get the Ivy League bid to the Dance. They lost to Dartmouth in the last minute to force a playoff game with Harvard.
They lost that too. They ended play on Sunday with an RPI rating of #61.
Guess where Yale is playing their post-season basketball...
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THEY AREN'T!!!
Not the NIT, CBI, or CollegeInsider.com tournaments took them. Yale was 22-10, 10-3 in the Ivy League.
Now, yes, none of the at-larges, but FIFTEEN teams below them made the NCAA tournament.
The CollegeInsider.com tournament took DARTMOUTH, 7-7 in the league, 14-14 overall. That's the only other Ivy League team playing on after Selection Sunday.
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Now, to the 600-pound gorilla in the room: 40-0.
Only seven teams have pulled off the feat of running the table in an NCAA season. UCLA four times, the University of San Francisco (with Bill Russell and KC Jones), North Carolina once (and 25 years before Gaaaaahd...), and the last team to do it was the 1975-76 Indiana team.
(An eighth team ran the table in 1939, Long Island University, and won the NIT tournament -- which, back then, according to the page I found it on Wikipedia, was the more prestigious tournament.)
(Two teams actually ran the table, but were ineligible.)
That 1975-76 Indiana team was the last team before this Kentucky team to go out of a major conference and run the table to the tournament.
The fact is this: You are one of three things if you do not pick Kentucky and their NBA training camp to win it all:
- An idiot
- A strategist
- or a conspiracy theorist.
It's so bad that, as I said last year, Kentucky fans actually were saying that the ones destroying college basketball were the players actually staying four years.
If Kentucky wins this national championship, goes 40-0, and becomes the first team in four decades to run the table, the current model of college basketball DIES.
The tournament may survive (even if the NCAA doesn't -- a friend of mine made a very good point that the TV networks themselves (Turner and CBS chief among them in the current model.) might well finance the mess.
The current structure might survive with a few also-rans dropping down.
The fact is this: It will get to the point that if you are an elite-caliber player, you're going to go to Kentucky... or to one of the few other schools which, after this year, will almost-certainly be FORCED to consider "Succeed and Proceed", especially with the recent word from the NBPA president that "One And Done" isn't going away anytime soon.
Keep this last statistic in mind: Calipari is in his sixth season coaching Kentucky. He has three Final Fours, one national title, and NINETEEN NBA draftees, and he has three of the last seven #1 draft picks (and he'd probably have had a fourth if Connecticut hadn't defeated Kentucky in what I saw as a huge upset).
This is what I find interesting: The NFL can keep college players out of the draft until three years after they graduate. Why can't the NBA? Is the NBA Player's Union more powerful than the NFL's?
ReplyDeleteMy honest opinion: There's a purpose to college football in the eyes of the NFL. It's another day of the week of the National Religion.
DeleteCollege basketball? Really, the only purpose of it started yesterday....