re: Joel Klatt: The NCAA basketball tournament is the "dumbest tournament in all of sports"

IMO, the lower seed teams make March Madness memorable. Nobody can recall what happened in a random first or second round game in the CFP or BCS from 3 years ago or 10 years ago -- if you are not pulling for one of the teams.

But if some 13 seed or 15 seed makes it to the Sweet 16 or Elite 8.....fans will be like: "FGCU or George Mason had a good run that year." (a decade or two later).

Let these small and midsize universities have a moment to enjoy.

Lehigh beating Duke, UMBC beating UVA, Fairleigh Dickinson beating Purdue, 150 year old Sister Jean being an internet celebrity. The tournament format truly gives us some fun memories.

He's not wrong. If, say, NcNeese played James Madison in the championship game for hoops, ratings would plummet.

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only thing I don't like is automatic qualifiers from winning a conference tourney
you disregard the whole regular season to give the tourney champ a bid and sometimes eliminating the best team from that particular conference doesn't make a whole lot of sense
all the talk about expanding the NCAA tourney would be great and you could eliminate conference tourneys and making teams play a lot of back to back games that for the most part are meaningless while risking injury to those teams players

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Automatic qualifiers is one of the things that makes March Madness special. I'm quick to trash Sankey for multiple reasons and this is just another one, him wanting to eliminate so major conferences get more bids is a gross tactic that is another nail in the coffin of college sports.

Basketball unlike football, any team can win if the other team is just having an off night and you can't miss. I'd rather watch the best teams fighting in "lesser" conferences" than watching two mid teams from "better" conferences.

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He's not wrong. If, say, McNeese played James Madison in the championship game for hoops, ratings would plummet.

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That is an "if" that will quite literally never come to fruition. #15 is the worst team that won the championship in the last 30 years.

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Basketball unlike football, any team can win if the other team is just having an off night and you can't miss. I'd rather watch the best teams fighting in "lesser" conferences" than watching two mid teams from "better" conferences.

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All the talent is being funneled upwards by NIL though…

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Agreed. Yale beat Auburn in the first round a couple of seasons ago as a 13-4 matchup. I can still tell you John Poulakidas scored 28 points in that game for Yale without looking it up. Joel Klatt is acting as if these lower seeds create havoc every year. How often does a double digit seed make a huge run through 2 or 3 rounds. Once every decade or 15 years?

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And so many Auburn fans blamed the tournament for "costing" them a shot, instead of their team losing to an Ivy League school

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Joel Klatt

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dumbest

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in all of sports

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That's better

He's right in the sense that it doesn't crown a true champion in some cases.

The whole idea of playoffs in American sports is a weird one.

As a huge Atlanta Braves fan, I have no preconceived notion that the Braves were the best team in 2021. Didn't even win 90 games in the regular season. But thanks to a weak division, they got into the playoffs and had homefield advantage in the NLCS against the 104-win Dodgers who didn't win their division... a home field advantage that helped tremendously with us winning the first two games via a bottom of the 9th walk off.

European soccer is the best way to crown a "true" champion in the sense that there are no playoffs. At the end of the regular season, the team with the most points is the champion.

With all that said, sports is about entertainment first and foremost... and playoffs are entertaining for the most part.

I would argue that college football is the only American sport where the expanded playoff makes it less entertaining. There was something about living and dying across a 12/13 game season, knowing that one loss could frick up your shite.

Klatt’s wrong here, but there’s some nuance to the reasoning. Basically, football and basketball are just different sports, and you shouldn’t make the same assumptions about what makes for a good playoff.

The difference comes down to injury risk and sample size.

Players get injured in football much more often than in basketball. This limits the number of games the teams can play. In turn, you don’t get a great sample size relative to the number of teams in the league. Compare to the NFL, which now has 32 teams playing 17 games, instead of 136 teams playing 12–13 games. Record is still a useful metric, but not useful enough to go on by itself.

Additionally, the games themselves are different in ways that limit building good sample sizes. Football scoring uses weird numbers, and the number of scoring opportunities is a lot lower. Basketball scoring is much more granular: the numbers are smaller, and you get a lot more scoring opportunities, so games have a smoother distribution of outcomes. This makes it easier to know who’s actually good and who’s not. If a basketball team is nuking everyone from orbit, you don’t find yourself asking “but have they played anybody?” the way you might with some football teams.

All of this adds up to different postseasons. In college basketball, you can spare a six-round tournament without worrying if all the contenders will suffer a meaningful injury from wear and tear. Great teams will also get plenty of chances, even in a single game, to shake off cold shooting streaks and assert their will on bad teams. In football, a six round tournament would get everybody killed lol. And if you have a few bad possessions, you might be cooked no matter how good the team is supposed to be. So the same formula that makes March Madness a success may just not fit football.

I’ll end by pointing out that people clearly care about more than just crowning the best team. People love a Cinderella story. Maybe football can’t spare indulgence of that desire like basketball can, but it’s worth pointing out that we don’t just want to crown the best team. That’s the most important thing but not the only thing.