Posted by Mechelle Voepel
Some people like conference tournaments and some don't. They are a little like the best and worst of family reunions … although sometimes it's hard to distinguish which is the best and which is the worst.
The big conferences and the regular-season champs in the medium and smaller leagues are united in this, of course: They want the favorites to win the automatic bid. Nothing makes the bigger conference schools' indigestion start acting up more than a smaller league's regular-season champ being upset in, say, the quarterfinals.
Because each one of those situations can erode the big leagues' multiple-bid possibilities. Which is why Texas A&M coach Gary Blair said on Tuesday's Big 12 teleconference he was rooting for schools like Old Dominion, Marist, Liberty and Hartford.
Then again, big leagues ought to be careful about what they wish for, considering things like the Sweet 16 runs of Marist last year and Liberty in 2005.
Bottom line, though, is the big leagues are greedy as heck. They want as few of those at-large bids as possible slipping away.
The big conferences' other issue with league tournaments is they can either be elated by or frustrated with how the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee will treat what goes on because that is something that seems to fluctuate depending on the mind-set of the committee members year-to-year.
Then again, the committee can't win. Everyone wants to be rewarded for a good tournament, but no one wants to be punished for a bad one. Coaches will either say, "Look, we're obviously the hot team now, so we deserve a better seed." Or they'll say, "Hey, look at what we did week in and week out during the season, not at one hiccup in the league tournament."
Seasons end for some teams and careers finish for some players at league tournaments. It's the second wave of the bittersweet part of every basketball season, following senior days/nights.
Goofy as it sounds, I always find myself thinking of that Garth Brooks' song, "The Dance," when the league tournaments end. There will be teams celebrating with sky-high hopes, and soon they will be absolutely devastated when they are bounced from the NCAA bracket. Texas Tech in 1998 is one of the more painful examples that comes to mind.
By the same token, sometimes teams that lose in the league tournament then go on to cut down the nets at the Final Four. Since just 2000 that has happened with Notre Dame (2001), UConn (2003, 2004), Maryland (2006) and Tennessee (2007).
Going into this year's league tournament smorgasbord, here are a few things to wonder about:
• Can Maryland win the ACC tournament for the first time since 1989? Or will top seed North Carolina continue the Tobacco Road run in that event? Either UNC or Duke has won 12 of the last 14 ACC tournaments, with the exception being Clemson in both 1996 and 1998.
• Will we see a Tennessee-LSU matchup in the SEC final? Does anybody outside of Vanderbilt fans remember that the Commodores took the title last season?
• Even rabid Big Ten fans will acknowledge this season has been uninspiring in that league. Can the tournament kind of make up for it?
• Can Kansas State stop the South division's run of six consecutive Big 12 tournament titles? The Wildcats had a tremendous regular season, and the tourney is in Kansas City, which will help K-State's crowd support. But no North division team has won the tournament since Iowa State in 2001. And K-State's last league tournament title came in 1984, when the Wildcats were still in the Big Eight.
• Stanford finished last in the Pac-10 … ha-ha, just seeing if you were playing attention. The Cardinal won the regular-season title and are the favorite entering the league tourney. But Cal is biting at Stanford's heals.
• After losing by 20 to UConn on Monday, how will Rutgers do in the Huskies Invitational, er, Big East tournament?
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