March 24, 201511 yr Titus' 20 NCAA Tournament Observations: Kentucky?s Roll, Villanova?s Swoon, and #BanCharges « This was a little vignette within Mark Titus' larger article which I found to be worthy of discussion. Could use this during football season too. 13. Teams — not conferences — win games. Can we please stop pretending that NCAA tournament results mean anything when determining the strength of conferences? The ACC was the best conference in America this year, but not because of anything that has happened in the last week. Louisville, North Carolina, NC State, and Notre Dame were all a shot away from losing in the first round. If the ball takes a different bounce in each of those games, suddenly the ACC gets only two teams out of the first round. Does the difference between the ACC being the best conference ever and entirely overrated really come down to four shots? If we start using March Madness results to rank conferences, we’ll get stuck in a cyclical argument from hell. If the ACC is the best just because it started the tournament 9-0, what does that say about the Big Ten, whose third-best team (Michigan State) cruised against the outright ACC champion (Virginia) in the next round? So now is the Big Ten best? The Big Ten’s second-best team (Maryland) just got the business from the Big 12’s fourth- or fifth-best team4 (West Virginia). But the Big 12 can’t be the best, because all sorts of Big 12 teams have been upset, including Big 12 champion Kansas, which lost to Wichita State. And, of course, even with the Shockers’ win, the Missouri Valley can’t be the best conference, because the second-best MVC team (Northern Iowa) lost to the fourth-best ACC team (Louisville). And just like that, we’re back where we started.
March 24, 201511 yr Agree with this It is about match ups in the tournament and not conference affiliations.
March 24, 201511 yr The only time this comes to light is when then SEC is involved, either positively or negatively. The SEC fans are the only ones that thump their chest about their conference, and now that the SEC has 1 team left everyone comes out of the woodwork. I have always found SEC almost unbearable during football season, especially the UK fan that insists his team would win the B1G or B12. You reap what you sew.
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