There’s been a lot of commentary already about how the NCAA selection committee short-changed the smaller conferences. Only six small conference teams got at-large bids this year, half the number from a few years back.
This actually understates the problem, though. Not only dis the committee take too few small teams, in a few cases, they also seeded them to play each other, rather than putting small schools against big schools. Take, for example, the 5-12 game in Maryland’s region, which pits Butler against Old Dominion– two small-conference programs who received at-large bids. Two of the other 5-12 games feature big-conference teams (VA Tech against Illinois, and USC against Arkansas), which is just silly– why not have VA Tech play Old Dominion, and Butler play Illinois?
(Well, the obvious answer is “because Illinois shouldn’t even be in the tournament,” but leave that aside. Why not Butler vs. Syracuse, or some other team that deserved the Illini’s #12 seed?)
There are a couple of other cases where similar things happen– Nevada-Creighton in a 7-10 game, BYU-Xavier in an 8-9 game. It shows that the committee is missing the whole point of having the small conference teams in this thing in the first place. The magic part of the first weekend is when small conference schools meet up with teams from the power conferences, and get a shot at the upset. If Old Dominion beats Butler, well, nobody cares, because nobody has seen Butler play, anyway. If Old Dominion beats VA Tech (tied for first in the mighty ACC), though, that would get people talking.
Of course, every year they say that they don’t pay any attention to conference affiliation when they make up the field, but that’s a bunch of crap. I suspect this was done deliberately to boost ticket sales– they figure that putting big-conference teams together will draw more fans into the arenas than matching big teams with unknown programs. They may even be right, because most people are idiots.
But in shorting the small-conference teams, and then seeding them to play each other, they’re taking away part of what makes “March Madness” so much fun for real fans of the game.