"We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes": The April After the March Before

by T Kyle King on Mar 24, 2008 9:18 PM EDT in Basketball

Because I know that what follows is bound to be unpopular, I begin with the shameless fulfillment of a three-week old promise and offer the following photograph of my children in an effort to invoke your sympathy for my position:

Now that the excitement is over, certain animadversions must be answered. While we all are proud of the Georgia men's basketball team for making the S.E.C. tournament run that won it an automatic bid to the N.C.A.A. tourney, my longstanding criticisms of playoffs in general (and of the big dance in particular) received a snide broadside after Dennis's Dogs went on their title run.

Likewise, a prominent and well-respected member of the intercollegiate athletics blogosphere sent me a congratulatory e-mail in which he opined, "I assume we'll be getting a 'We Didn't Deserve It' post and an apology to Kentucky or whichever winning team UGA knocked out."

While this is not that posting exactly, the point bears making that Georgia's late-season hot streak, while generating considerable excitement, did not produce much in the way of a legitimate conference title. Through and including the S.E.C. tournament championship game, these are the conference records of the league's twelve teams over the course of the 2007-2008 basketball season:

Tennessee: 15-3 (.833)
Mississippi State: 13-5 (.722)
Kentucky: 12-5 (.706)
Vanderbilt: 11-7 (.611)
Arkansas: 9-7 (.563)
Florida: 8-9 (.471)
Ole Miss: 7-10 (.412)
Georgia: 8-12 (.400)
L.S.U.: 6-11 (.353)
Alabama: 6-12 (.333)
South Carolina: 6-12 (.333)
Auburn: 4-13 (.235)

So, yeah, even including the four tournament victories alongside the Bulldogs' four regular-season wins, the Red and Black finished eighth overall in conference play among the twelve S.E.C. teams.

Over the course of the regular season and the postseason, Georgia went 1-0 against Alabama, 2-0 against Arkansas, 1-0 against Auburn, 0-2 against Florida, 1-2 against Kentucky, 0-1 against Louisiana State, 1-1 against Mississippi, 1-1 against Mississippi State, 1-1 against South Carolina, 0-2 against Tennessee, and 0-2 against Vanderbilt. Of the seven Southeastern Conference squads that got to the end of the tournament with better overall league ledgers than Dennis's Dogs, Georgia had a winning record against one of them and, even counting S.E.C. tournament contests, the Red and Black were winless against three of them.

For those of us who have criticized the sorts of systems that produce such dubious champions as the 1997 Florida Marlins, the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals, and the 2007 New York Giants merely because they happened to win the games that really counted despite having been comparatively undeserving over the course of the entire campaign, this year's Georgia men's basketball team, while exciting to watch for four days in March, is a pretty undeserving conference champion at 8-12 in league play.

Yes, it was fun to watch. Yes, I am looking forward to next basketball season. At the end of the day, though, even counting the Bulldogs' S.E.C. tournament wins, Georgia's conference record earned the Red and Black a fifth-place finish in the East. There's a reason why we were wishing for a swift resolution to Coach Felton's uncertain job situation barely over two hours before the start of the title run.

Snarky sarcasm about how "disappointing" it was "to see the entire regular season rendered moot by a 4 day run in the SEC tournament" aside, the fact is that any system that can produce a conference champion with an 8-12 league ledger and an 0-2 record against the best team in the conference is a system in which the term "champion" has become sufficiently disconnected from reality as to be essentially meaningless.

Am I wrong about that? You can let me know in the comments below and give me your take on Georgia's S.E.C. tournament title by voting here, but I feel like I'm in pretty good company with the wise man who wrote these words:

The net result for us in experiencing the NCAA tourney from the vantage point of deep inside the smoky anus of Vegas is this: college football must never, ever have a playoff. Nevah. That's our gut instinct right now after having watched the weird dénouement of the tourney's first weekend in Vegas and realizing that the NCAA cannot effectively coordinate the mating of two donkeys, much less a major football tournament.

Because we're typing this off our phone while waiting in line to be told that we're not making our connecting flight in Phoenix, we'll be succinct: the season remains everything in college football, and a playoff would tangibly devalue the regular season's value. Man on moon, yes; but seeing the dispassion of turning the game into a neatly compressed lump of productmeat suitable for easy heat 'n bake consumption made us irrationally sad.

As it stands, every team with a decent body of work gets their one moment in the sun, unless they get the Motor City Bowl, in which case they at least get a moment of glory in the rain of fiery ashes and locusts that has been pelting Detroit for 40 years or so. A playoff kills that dead.

Onto the plane. It's strictly working on the lizard brain level right now, but the image of a season easily ended in tidy fashion on four screens in Vegas makes us want to split the rails of a playoff train's tracks and watch the wreck ensue.

It's just this weekend's Colbert gut instinct, but it's there.

So wrote Orson Swindle, the People's Champ.

Go 'Dawgs!

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Comments

It's important how the tournament is seeded

Earlier this year, in the context of the NY Giant's exciting Super Bowl win, I argued that the Giants made a great case for why a playoff was a good thing. I will stand by that argument here, even as I agree that the Bulldogs SEC Championship is somewhat suspect.

I think an important distinction between the two concerns how the playoff tournament is populated. In the case of the Giants, they had to prove out through the course of the season that they were a team of substance. They weren't the best--the Patriots were that--but they were good; they had earned the right to compete for the championship by with a record good enough to earn the Wild Card. In the case of the Bulldogs, they never should have been playing for a championship in the first place.

The SEC tournament includes every single team from the SEC. This Bulldogs team winning the SEC Championship is akin to giving the Detroit Lions a chance to win the Super Bowl. At least the NFL's playoff excludes teams that don't have a right to be there. If the SEC tourney were even just a 6 team affair, or even better, a 4 team playoff, that championship might be meaningful.

I really like giving a team the opportunity to step up and play "when it counts" at the end of a season, as long as they had to earn the right to play for it all.

by zinzarin on Mar 24, 2008 10:29 PM EDT 0 recs

Thanks, zinzarin

You make a good point about limiting the number of entrants into the playoff field (as, e.g., the S.E.C. does in the conference baseball tournament in Hoover, Ala., each spring).

I would argue, though, that any playoff that allows "wild card" teams at all is setting itself up for some indefensible results, including last year's Giants.

I simply cannot countenance the idea of a team that won no sort of championship (division or conference) during the regular season being allowed to play for it all in the postseason. The S.E.C. championship game and the pre-divisional series baseball playoffs (consisting only of the two League Championship Series and the World Series) are one thing, but, when teams that are champions of nothing are given a chance to become champions of everything, the standards for admission are too low.

The most controversial moments in the history of the B.C.S. have come when non-conference champions were allowed (Nebraska 2001, Oklahoma 2003) or almost were allowed (Michigan 2006, Georgia 2007) to compete for national titles. Other sports permit such absurdities routinely, as a matter of course; college football is the only sport that disdains them and at least has the good sense to be embarrassed when such results come to pass.

By the way, this is neither here nor there, but I spotted an error in my list of the S.E.C. teams' respective finishes: Arkansas was 9-7 during the regular season, but I inadvertently omitted the Razorbacks' overall league ledger including tournament play, which came to 11-8 (.579). My bad.

by T Kyle King on Mar 24, 2008 10:43 PM EDT 0 recs

Playoffs make great TV...

Kyle, I think your post is dead-on. Every March, we get asinine arguments from talking heads about how the Big Dance "proves" football needs playoffs because, after all, doesn't 20-loss Coppin State "deserve a chance"? And yet playoffs are also the "fairest" way to pick a champion? That doesn't add up.

I won't disagree with anyone arguing that tournaments are exciting to watch. It was certainly fun to see Georgia complete our highly-improbable run through the SEC, and it will be great to raise a conference championship banner next season. But that doesn't change the fact that, as you said, we really didn't have a championship year.

Even if you limit playoff entry, you still have problems. You have the Giants winning the Super Bowl. You also have clamor for more playoff slots. There's an argument that says there would be much less controversy over picking the #8 college football team than there is over picking #2. You think? Did you notice Virginia Tech being upset about not making a field of 65? Or Bobby Knight suggesting expanding to a field of 128?

Realistically, VT would have almost no chance of actually winning, and team #128 would have even less. What this says to me is that lower-end NCAA tournament bids have about as much to do with picking a champion (and having "meaningful" postseason games) as the Motor City Bowl. So why do we need playoffs again?

by NMdawgs on Mar 25, 2008 7:19 PM EDT 0 recs