March Madness Begins Tonight

Posted on March 2nd, 2010 by jamiemac 4 Comments

It begins tonight. March Madness. The NCAA Tournament. For all intents and purposes it’s officially on tonight, albeit in an unofficial capacity, with a trio of mid-major conferences beginning their league tournaments tonight. To the victors go the spoils of a bid into the final field of 65. To the losers, well, it’s elimination time. Game Over. Try again next year. Enjoy the offseason.

Of course, its just an unofficial beginning. Nobody counts tonight as the start of the tournament, but they really should. There has been a lot of hullabaloo about expanding the tournament field. My take? There is no reason for major expansion of the field, and its because of these league tournaments. If they do expand all the way to 96 teams, a 50-percent increase in teams and a doubling of at large qualifiers, I shudder to think what sort of candidates would be tabbed this year to fill a 96-team field. You’re dipping into teams who are hard pressed to make the NIT when doubling the amount of at large bids. I do feel some expansion is warranted, but I m talking about something like 4-8 teams and hold a series of play-in games between the final at large bids. Have those games on a Tuesday, with the winners playing each other in the 8/9 game. Someting subtle, but gets to the root of including those deserving final few teams that get sliced and diced off the board and into the NIT. Going to 96 teams seems ridiculous. Teams like Illinois, Minnesota and Northwestern would be sitting pretty instead of needing to make major statements the next two weeks. There would be no intrigue on the Big East Bubble as most of the teams would certainly see a bid in a 96-team field. It would make all the jostling on the bubble in the weeks leading up to Selection Sunday a lot less relevant with the important games being played by teams significantly more mediocre than the ones playing the high pitched bubble battles this week.

And, it ignores the obvious point that sharp analysts have been making the whole time. The NCAA Tournament includes virtually everybody when you take conference tournaments into account. Whether you’re Tennessee State from the Ohio Valley or Providence in the Big East, your sub .500 record and your final position in the bottom half of the standings is wiped clean. Win your local sectional, and you’ll be dancing when the CBS spotlight shines on the tournament’s opening day. It’s March 2, and almost everybody still have a chance for their moment in the Field of 65 Sun.

Instead of expanding the tournament, how about expanding both the definition and the covergae of the tournament. As a college hoop junkie, I consider these games tonight as NCAA Tournament games. So should everyone else, including the networks who cover it. So, it begins tonight. We’ve reached another March. Buckle in and have fun. To get us started, a quick snapshot of the three sectionals the begin tonight.

OHIO VALLEY CONFERENCE

I dont know if there are too many teams during the Championship Week extravaganza that have more pressure to win than the Murray State Racers of the Ohio Valley Conference. The anxiety is two-fold. One, they are overwhelming favorites to win this field, by virtue of their 17-1 league mark, which lapped the field during the league’s regular season portion. Secondly, I bet the good folks in Racer Nation feel an appearance in the NCAA Tournament is a bit of a birthright. In one stretch from the late 1980s through the early 2000s, Murray State had qualified for 13 NCAA tournaments by winning the OVC. But, they’ve only advanced past this weekend once in the last six years and have not made an NCAA appearance since 2006. This seasaon was all about re-establishing themselves atop the OVC pecking order and getting back into the tournament. They’ve accomplished the former by routing the OVC field all winter long. But, if they cant win this week and pull off the latter, then everything has been for naught. Some other OVC club will be coverd with glory. The Racers are well regarded by the efficiency wonks, placing 60th in the Pomeroy Ratings. They’ve proven to be way too proficient for their fellow Ohio Valley brethern to handle and it would be beyond a letdown if they cant get out of this bracket.

I heard this stat during Bracket Buster Saturday: The Racers are the only team in the nation to shoot better than 50 percent and hold the opposition to less than 40 percent. Every other team that has managed that before has made it to the Final Four. That’s obviously pie-in-the-sky for the Racers, but it speaks to the kind of upset it would be if Murray cant win this sectional. If they lose in the quarterfinals to Tennessee State this evening on their home court, it might go down as the single biggest upset of the month. It would at least be in the team photo. TSU was left for dead several weeks ago. They kicked a few players off the team and were mired at 1-10 in the league standings. But, a late season winning streak qualifed for the last spot in the OVC sectional, where their charge is to pull a big stunner on the first night of tournament action. Murray beat TSU by 21 and 22 points in the two games they played this season and Pomeroy gives the Racers a 97-percent chance of winning tonight. Eastern Illinois and Eastern Kentucky play each other in th 4/5 quarterfinal with the winner playing the MSU/TSU Friday night.

Other contenders in this field include Morehead State, the defending champ. Morehead is the 2-seed in this field. They won this event last season, emerged victorious in the play-in game before ultimately falling to UNC in a 1/16 game in the NCAA Tournament. They have four startes back from last season, and its not like they had a subpar season, despite not being able to keep pace with Murray State in the standings. They only finished two games back and last week became the only team in the OVC to beat the Racers. They open their defense of last year’s crown against Jacksonville State. While a Murray/Morehead championship game Saturday night is expected to be in the cards, if anyone could upset that apple cart, it might be Austin Peay. The Governors probably have as much brand name appeal to bracket historians as the Racers. And, they’ve been money in this tournament, advancing at least into the finals of this sectional in six of the last seven years. As the #3 seed, they open play with a quarterfinal game against Tennessee Tech.

All four games tonight are held on the higher seeds home court. The games can be followed through OVCsports.tv. Winners advance to Nashville for Friday night’s semifinals on ESPN U with a spot in Saturday’s title game on ESPN2.

BIG SOUTH CONFERENCE

Coastal Carolina is the chalk in the Big South Tournament. The sectional begins tonight with quarterfinal action on the home court of the higher seed. Those games can be tracked via the Big South Network. Winners advance into the semifinals on Thursday night. Those games will be on EPSN U and will be held on Coastal’s home court in Conway, South Carolina. Coastal’s gift for winning the regular season crown was home court advantgae throughout the tournament.

I actually find this bracket interesting on certain fronts. Take Coastal’s opening game tonight against VMI. The Keydets had been a trendy team in this league for the last several years, with the high octane, Loyola-Marymount circa 1989 offense. But despite all those points, VMI could never break through and win this field to qualify for the NCAAs. This year, they’ve taken a major step back as they’ve done a complete personnel makeover. It’s evidenced in their lowly 8th seed in this field. They’re lucky to even still be playing. They finished 5-13 in league play and only made this field by beating out Gardner-Webb on the third tiebreaker, by virtue of having a better record against the fifth place team in the league. Their reward? A match tonight against the Chanticleers, who rolled VMI by 30 points Saturday night. Good luck.

Radford, the defending the champ, is the #2 seed and opens play against Charleston Southern. Winthrop and Liberty, perhpas the two schools that come close to being Big South brand names, expect deep runs in this field every year, but are relegated to playing each other tonight in the 3/6 game. The other quarterfinal game is between UNC Asheville and High Point with the winner playing the Coastal/VMI winner.

HORIZON LEAGUE

Unlike the OVC and the Big South, the Horizon League, which also begins its postseason tournament tonight, does it the right way, by letting all its teams into the field. They put forth a real quirky format to pull it off. The top two seeds Butler and Wright State received double byes into the semifinals. They wont play until Saturday afternoon. Their opponents are determined through two rounds of play, tonight at on campus sites and Friday night in Indianapolis on Butler’s home court. The first two rounds will be broadcast on the Horizon TV Network. The semifinals are Saturday on ESPN U and the Championship game is next Tuesday night on ESPN. So, this field wont see resolution for a full week, but I think spreading it out in order to ensure all your teeams a spot is a good thing.

First round play begins tonight with four games. Cleveland State, one of last year’s enduring Cinderella images, begins their trek for the glass slipper again. They’ve fallen back to pack a bit as theyve tried to replace all-everything J’Nathan Bullock, one of the best players in the country last year, let alone in the Horizon League. They’re the fifth seed in this field and open play tonight and host Loyola Chicago. The winner plays the UIC-Wisconsin Milwaukee winner on Friday. This side of the bracket is on the other end of Butler, so while CSU has to four games in eight days just to make it back to the Dance, they wont have to worry about playing the powerful Bulldogs in next week’s finals. The Vikings were just the 3-seed in last yearr’s Horizon Tournament, but still won the field, trounced Wake Forest in the NCAAs before losing to Arizona in the Round of 32. The other hald of the first two rounds includes Youngstown at Green Bay and Valpo and Detroit. Winners play each other Friday for a spot opposite Butler in Saturday’s semifinals. This whole field is worth a watch if you’re a fan of a bubble team. Butler will make the NCAAs regardless of what happens. Should they get upset during this sectional, then the Horizon will get a second bid and somebody’s else bubble will burst.

These were just quick sketches of those brackets. I’ll have more in depth coverage of these fields as we go along, including a full breakdown of the Big South and OVS semifinals on Thursday and Friday. And, dont fret, we will be offering picks. Lots of them. Those cookies are still baking, however.

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