NCAA Basketball: San Diego State, Baylor exposed and more takeaways

8) Positive trend for mid-major tournaments

Last year, the West Coast Conference unveiled a brand new conference tournament bracket that automatically put the top two seeds from the regular season into the tournament semifinals, giving them a huge advantage.

It’s not your traditional bracket, but it’s not supposed to be. Since mid-major conferences usually don’t consistently produce at-large bids, rewarding your best teams in this way gives them a better chance to actually win the tournament and represent the conference in the NCAA Tournament.

Now, you could argue the WCC doesn’t need to do this considering the strength of Gonzaga, plus Saint Mary’s and BYU this year, but it’s a concept that benefits mid-majors. And we’re seeing many other conferences adopt it.

Mid-major conferences are often caught in this conundrum – they want to have a conference tournament for the TV revenue but also want their best team to play in the NCAA Tournament, as that gives the conference the best chance to win games there. But, too often, regular tournament formats lend themselves to upsets that keep that from happening.

Take Northern Iowa, for example. They were the best team in the Missouri Valley all year long and were a team no one wanted to face in the NCAA Tournament. Now, after losing to Drake in the conference quarterfinals, they are expected to miss the Big Dance altogether, putting a lesser team from the MVC in the field. That hurts the conference as a whole.

This year, the Horizon, Ohio Valley, Southland, and Sun Belt have all followed suit. It already worked for the OVC, who got a classic showdown between top two seeds Belmont and Murray State. It’s important for the Southland, too, as they’d love to put Stephen F. Austin in the tournament given the win over Duke on their resume.

This format serves as a happy medium for these conferences – they still get the TV revenue of having a tournament but also give their best teams a very big and very real advantage. I expect many more mid-major conferences to adopt this format in the coming years.