[jbduke]

Using the NCAA Tournament as a metric for the strength of any conference is at best short-sighted and at worst meaningless.

Since at latest January, everybody who has followed college basketball has believed that Illinois was one of the two best teams in the country. During that period, I don't think that there was any confusion that Illinois was in the Big Televen. Illinois was rightly seeded tops in the entire tournament. They have ridden that seed to a well-deserved, but unsurprising place in the Final Four. That they have performed to seed should not change anyone's perception of the strength of Illinois's conference.


Michigan State's unexpected appearance in the Final Four has also sparked some people to question their assessment of that league. Again, I ask, why? Tom Izzo and his team deserve a tremendous amount of credit; they're the only team in the Final Four who had to go through the two highest seeds in the region other than themselves. However, that MSU is playing its best basketball right now does not change the strength of the Big Ten. Syracuse would have been a much, much worse match-up for State than Duke was, because the Spartans--contrary to their second-half performance against Kentucky--are not a very good perimeter shooting team. If Syracuse had beaten Vermont and Michigan State, no one would have been very surprised. If that had happened, we're likely looking at Syracuse, Kentucky, or Duke in the Final Four out of the South, and nobody is talking about how underrated the Big Ten was.

Again, to be clear, I'm not taking anything away from MSU. They deserve to be where they are. But they deserved to be a five-seed, too, according to Tom Izzo today on the Dan Patrick Show, because they did not acquit themselves overly well during the regular season.

Am I supposed to give the Big Ten a lot of credit because Wisconsin made the elight eight? Let's take another look at their path: first round, they beat eleventh seed Northern Iowa, one of the last two teams in the tournament. Second round, they benefit from the biggest upset of the tournament, Bucknell over Kansas. Third round, nice win, but over ten-seed NC State. So in four games, Wisconsin gets one quality win and beats two teams it was seeded above. Again, this shouldn't change anyone's perception of the strength of the Big Ten. And for those that want to talk about how well they played UNC, I propose a thought experiment. If 'Sconsin had been an eight or nine, and played Carolina tight before falling in the second round, would anyone be falling all over themselves talking about how much better the Big Ten was than the so-called experts had said? No way.

The NCAA's knock-out format is a wonderful spectacle. To see Duke and Bucknell win is why I watch. To see Duke lose is why others watch. But the Tournament shouldn't be made into something it's not. It's a very, very small sample of games, and there are too many variables at work in college basketball games to be able to paint anything close to a full picture using only sixty-four games as the data set. The tournament is designed to yield a national champion. There's no mention of 'best team.' We don't have to define that term, because it doesn't matter. What matters is who can win six (or seven) games to end the season.

Similarly, we should recognize the regular season for what it is: A long stretch of games that gives people a good idea of what they can expect, on average, from all of the teams. This is how conferences are evaluated going into the post-season, and this is more than reasonable. What's not reasonable is to look at a team's performances in a handful of games and decide because a team exceeded or fell short of their average expectation over a large sample, that your earlier assessment was in error.

The Big Ten had a weak league this year. They didn't deserve many teams. And if the teams they got in had had slightly different draws, maybe they're not playing anymore. What if Michigan State and Louisville had been 5-4 in the same region? Anybody shocked if Louisville wins that second-round game? Of course not. Should that change your assessment of the Big Ten? Of course not.

Let's all enjoy the wonderful tournament that's going on. Let's just be content to be drunk on fun basketball, and not go nuts on revising history.