Why play the season?

I'll be blunt. I live for March Madness. There is little about this time of year that I don't enjoy. You can't beat being able to turn on the TV at virtually anytime of day and being able to get a basketball game. I eat it all up - the bubble watch, the Cinderella teams, the pundits going back and forth, who's in, who's out, who got lucky, who got snubbed. Every year I fill out my bracket, and almost every year I've torn it up by the 2nd weekend, and yet I keep coming back for more.

In my view, the NCAA men's basketball tournament ranks right up there with the Super Bowl and a few other select events as one of the greatest and most exciting sporting events each year. Think about it: take 65 teams from across the country, toss them in 4 sections of 1 big bracket, and let them fight it out: Do or die, win or go home. Forget the records, this is all about winning 6 in a row. I can't think of a better celebration of basketball, or of sports in general.

And all of this is why what happened tonight offends me so much, as a fan of March Maddness and sports in general. For those who aren't keeping up, Oakland (Mich) of the Mid-Continent Conference, who ended the regular season with twice as many losses (18) as wins (9), will be in the NCAA tournament, complete with their 12-18 record. Seeded 7th in the Mid-Continent Conference tournament, Oakland went on a stunning 3 game run, culminating with a buzzer beating 3 pointer which gave them a 61-60 victory over top seed Oral Roberts (26-7) So, a team that still has won exactly 40% of its games will receive an invite to dance on the biggest stage there is.

And so I ask: why play the season? If, in the case of Oral Roberts, a season's worth of work can be flushed down the toilet in one unfortunate game, what's the point? Likewise, if a season's worth of ineptitude can be erased with one good week, why bother? But this is what we've just seen happen, and will continue to see happen as long as conference tournaments control NCAA bid destinies. This is not a shot at Oakland. They've won their bid fair and square, by the same rules everyone else plays by. And it's not like they are the first to do so. This is, in fact, the 4th year in a row that a team has been granted entrance to the national championship tournament with a sub .500 record.

Don't get me wrong: conference tournaments make for some great and exciting basketball. I'm sure that had I been able to watch, I would have found Oakland's run very exciting. And I understand why conferences put that automatic bid out there for grabs in the conference tournament. It adds incentive and urgency to the games, generating excitement and pulling in revenue. I get that, it's ultimately a money thing, and thus I know that it will likely never change. Still, call me a purist, call me old fashioned, but I think an invitation to play for the national championship should be earned by a body of work over an entire season, and that teams that play the best basketball all season long should be rewarded over a team that got hot for one week.

Even with the understanding that the conference tournaments are here to stay, can we at least make a rule that you have to have won more games than you lost to play in the national championship tournament? That doesn't seem terribly unfair, does it? Then again, maybe I'm just out of touch and misguided.