Big change would help college basketball

“Three days of basketball are more important than three months of basketball.”

That’s a familiar refrain from college basketball coaches, and it’s right on the money.

Look, I love conference tournaments, as do most sports fans. Sitting courtside for a full day of conference tournament action might be my favorite part of my job. But those few days of tournament play shouldn’t be more important than the months of play leading up to them.

That, however, is what we have with the automatic bids from conferences to the NCAA Tournament focusing on the conference tournaments instead of the regular season.

Former Duke star and current ESPN commentator Jason Williams has a terrific plan to solve this problem. The automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament should go to the regular-season champions in the conferences, while a tournament championship would land an automatic berth to the NIT (and those teams would still go to the NCAA Tournament if the committee picks them).

That reverses what we have now and would be a terrific step in the right direction for college basketball if the conferences would step up and do it, and they’re the ones who make the choice.

Some will argue that such a move would take away from the conference tournaments, and that might be true. But it actually would add more meaning to winning a regular-season title, which would offset any issues with the conference tournaments.

Too many people don’t even watch college basketball until the conference tournaments or the NCAA Tournament. Putting more of an emphasis on the regular season would help change that.

And really, do those conference tournaments mean much anyway? In the power conferences, they really don’t. It’s not very often that we see some underdog, struggling team work its way through the larger tournaments to win a title and make it to the NCAA Tournament. It’s more likely that any underdog that wins a game or two runs out of gas by the time the semifinals or championship games come along because of byes and even double-byes given to the top teams.

In the conferences that get fewer bids — or even just one bid — those kinds of upsets are more likely and impactful. But is that the best thing for those conferences?

Is it better for those conferences to have a team that has zero chance of winning in the NCAA Tournament representing them? Or would it be better for those conferences to send their top team and have a chance to showcase the best they have to offer?

Sure, the excitement surrounding the tournaments for the one-bid conferences is undeniable, but a week (or two) later, those conferences typically are knocked out early in the NCAA Tournament. Granted, the underdog feel of the NCAA Tournament is what makes it special and makes it stand out from other sporting events, but the top teams in the smaller conferences still offer that kind of excitement — and they have a better chance to do some damage.

This isn’t a call to take away upsets or underdogs from the NCAA Tournament. If that was the goal, the committee would just take the top 68 teams and not have any automatic bids. That might produce better basketball, but it certainly would change the feel of the tournament.

But there has to be a way to find a middle ground, and Williams’ idea is the best I’ve heard yet.

This story was originally published March 8, 2017 at 3:10 PM with the headline "Big change would help college basketball."