March Madness: Why 2018-19 season is different when it comes to mid-majors

With a weak bubble this season, more mid-majors may be getting more chances to make the NCAA Tournament. Compared to who they’re up against, they should be getting the nod.

Depending on your vantage point, this season has provided the perfect storm for bubble squads.

The results have been more chaotic than usual all season, there are only a handful of consensus good teams, all the “Power” conference bubble squads keep losing, and there are what seems like a historically-high amount of great mid-major squads.

Most years, the mediocre team sitting in ninth place in their conference would get the nod over the second-best team from a mid-major league. And they would maybe deserve that nod. That will probably still be the case this season.

But, especially with the perfect storm brewing on this year’s bubble and within this year’s field of potential tournament teams, why not give these smaller schools a shot?

Looking at it purely aesthetically and as a basketball fan, to me it’s more exciting to have a 12-seed UNC Greensboro rather than a 12-seed Texas, just to pick two examples. Neither team is winning the national title most likely, but UNC G being in the tournament provides more potential excitement.

If Texas wins that first round game, unless its on a buzzer beater or if one of their players drops 40, we’re going to forget about that game by the time the second weekend rolls around.

If UNC G wins? That’s automatically the biggest win the school has had in decades. It’s definitely getting a slot in the One Shining Moment montage and will probably get brought up for years to come.

Look, I get it. I really do. It’s tougher to play through a Power conference gauntlet than it is to play through a mid-major season. I would never indicate otherwise. But to suggest that it’s not hard to make it through conference play in any league nearly unscathed is wrong.

And when comparisons are made between mediocre Power conference teams and top-notch mid-major squads, it’s not to say that the smaller school would automatically win or that they would even automatically deserve the bid over the bigger school.

It’s just to point out, “hey, these teams are actually pretty even resume and metrics-wise, maybe it isn’t fair to completely dismiss the mid-major squad just for being from a lower-ranked conference.”

These schools can’t help that they aren’t in a major conference. They oftentimes schedule as strongly as they can in the non-conference, and there are plenty of factors at play as to why they don’t schedule even harder than they do.

Plenty of people smarter and more in the know than me have written about it. It’s a simple Google search away. It’s not like all of these teams are purposefully hiding from the top teams.

The mid-major conference schedule, no matter how much the various leagues improve, can only provide so many quality games. And any slip up is catastrophic. Because losing to almost anyone in your conference, even though these are the teams that know your squad inside and out, would destroy your resume.

And this doesn’t even extend to just the mid-majors on the bubble. Belmont, Lipscomb, Furman, UNC Greensboro, Toledo. These teams all have a legit case to be included in this year’s tournament, using both the metrics and the eye test. They are all within the 68 best teams in the country with ease.

If I were to be granted total autonomy over the tournament this season, you better believe Chris Clemons and Mike Daum and Justin Wright-Foreman would be joining the fracas even though their teams aren’t even close to the bubble. It’s a shame that those three guys won’t get a shot to play on the biggest stage this season (And besides Daum, ever).

In these cases, I’d probably just sub them out for their respective conference’s title game winners because they were all the TOP TEAMS IN THEIR CONFERENCES ALL SEASON LONG. (Seriously if we want the best competition, mid-major schools should just send their regular season champs to the Big Dance, but that opens up a whole different set of problems. It’s a battle for another day.)

A team like Indiana should and will get dozens of more chances to play in the tournament. If the tournament already isn’t about strictly finding the 68 best teams and pitting them against each other, why not take a further step in ensuring excitement and interest.

Yes, Indiana arguably has a better resume than UNC Greensboro or Belmont or Lipscomb, but I can’t help but think the tournament is better off with the teams who are playing the best basketball in the history of their programs rather than the teams that aren’t even a blip on the radar of their program’s history. They have more to play for.

As great as Dylan Windler and Mike Daum and Chris Clemons and Garrison Mathews and Francis Alonso are, this could very well be the biggest game they ever play in. Romeo Langford will be a lottery pick in three months.

I know it’s far from a perfect solution, and it certainly would be a cause of ire for fans of Power conference teams and CBS executives and bracketologists alike, but having these teams in the tournament simply makes more sense to me, even if it doesn’t make sense at all.