Seriously, why do we need a play-in game, or opening round as it is actually called. I understand that that 65th spot goes to an at-large bid, and not the 2 teams playing in the plain-game, but the whole idea is just hokey. It sounds like a solution I made when I was 5 playing basketball on my generic Nerfoop.
Both college football and college basketball have the tradition, and the atmosphere and everything, and football obviously has better tailgating...but there is something that basketball offers that football doesn't. Parity. And it's beautiful. All season long in college football, you could make a resonable guess and who's going to be the top 8 teams, and the final four. But in basketball anything can happen.
I'm looking through the basketball rankings, and the top 4 are Florida, UCLA, Ohio State and Wisconsin. They seem like good teams, but not one is so dominant that I would pencil them in for the championship game.
If I remember correctly, the reason for the 65th team is because when the NCAA expanded the field to 64, they made up some rule about the number of at-large bids. Then, when they added a conference, they didn't want to take away from the at-large bids. Something about the power conferences not wanting a spot taken away because of a new conference (Sun Belt maybe? Or something equally as likely to get a 16 seed every year).
ReplyDeleteThe way I see, who cares about the play-in game? You don't even have to pick it right for all of the pools. I never even notice who gets the right to lose.