NCAA Basketball: Why do mid-majors get less respect than power schools?

NCAA Tournament Seeding

One thing that almost every coach at every mid-major can agree on is mid majors are usually under seeded in the NCAA tournament. This has a lot of factors, but it also has a lot to do with the national disrespect many of the conferences get. The Committee has built-in their algorithms the conferences that are automatically going to be on the 15 and 16 seed lines, regardless of how good those teams are. The conferences usually reserved for those seed lines belong to the NEC, SWAC, MEAC, Big South, and Big Sky.

Those teams must have a record season in order to move off those seed lines and even then, they likely will be delegated to face one of the top 8 seeds in the tournament. Someone has to play those games, but the fact that it is always the same teams, usually to ensure the top eight seeds make it to the second round and beyond to the tournament destroys the parity in the game. The conferences playing those games are normally the schools with the lopsided records and the metrics that would lead to them playing in those games.

Many of the teams from the extremely small schools that make up the HBCU’s in the MEAC and the SWAC and the schools of the Big South, NEC and Big Sky don’t have the money to function as an athletic department for the entire season without going on the road for much of the non-conference portion of the schedule. They are going to be taking games against Kentucky, Duke, North Carolina, and any of the power conference schools to go get a huge paycheck.

Those paychecks keep the athletic department functioning the entire season. These schools barely have enough money even though those games to have a budget for recruiting or for arena renovations. The lack of parity especially within the NCAA hierarchy hurts these teams the worst.