Tournament brackets

[Hawks Coach]

No parity in the ACC? I'm sorry, but 6 teams made the tournament for a reason this year, and Duke lost games down the stretch to (who you might ask?) - - four ACC teams. And the year that MD won the championship, as well as the year before when Duke won, the rest of the ACC got hosed because those teams were so powerful that everyone else was viewed as weak. I thought that others could have gone, and others may have showed very well in those years - they just didn't get the chance.

In the post UCLA era, which is precisely 30 yrs, the ACC has won 8 championships with 4 teams, 3 by Duke, 2 by NC St, 2 by UNC, and 1 by MD. In that time, the Big Ten has 6 by 3 teams - IU with 3, 2 by MSU, and UM 1. NC state was down, but so was MSU for 20 years before the Flint kids arrived. and prior to Magic Johnson, when did they win anything? That's right - never. IU had a 15 year gap. All teams and conferences go through this (though we have yet to see this from Coach K at Duke). The Big East was everything, and then crashed hard. they had a 6 year span with no Final Four teams. SEC and ACC have been pretty consistent, but the SEC leans heavily on Kentucky for that consistency.

Final fours I will grant you, the Big Ten has more variety recently, and the Big Ten has been very deep in the past. Not this year. And I am not sure what point you want to make about recent history. sure, duke didn't make the final four last two years. But the ACC has 2 of the last 3 championships.

Your one argument may be best of all - parity may get you lots of strong teams who can advance to a certain degree, but look for championships from conferences where teams have a slightly easier path. Teams from the power conferences without parity are probably a bit mentally sharper at this time of year than teams that have slugged it out in every game during the season. It wears you down.