The college basketball season tips off next week. When the season winds down and March Madness draws near, you’re going to wonder what in the hell is happening in the Sun Belt Conference.
College football realignment has become a cash grab. The Big Ten and the SEC don’t just want all of the football money, they want basketball money too, which is why they’re pushing to expand the NCAA Tournament. The logic is simple. The more teams from your league that make the Big Dance, the more money they make.
The financial equation is different for small conferences. For leagues like the Sun Belt Conference, they will only get one automatic qualifier, barring something extraordinary. To maximize the money they make in the NCAA Tournament, they need their best team in the field to potentially pull off a March Madness upset.
Cinderella stories are great, but they don’t make money if they happen too early. That is why leagues have shifted the format of their conference tournaments to give the best regular-season teams a leg-up once they begin single-elimination play for a bid to the Big Dance.
The West Coast Conference was the first to adopt a format that heavily favors the top seeds. Gonzaga only needed to win two games to secure an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament.
On Thursday, the Sun Belt Conference unveiled a similarly staggered bracket. What makes it look even more unusual is that the Sun Belt has 14 teams instead of nine, making their bracket look absolutely ridiculous.
For a team seeded 11-14, they would have to win seven straight games to reach the NCAA Tournament. Even though there is some merit to rewarding teams who excelled in the regular season, this is a bit much.
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