And I keep getting sick thinking about how we could have had that same path if we don’t play a double overtime energy sucker or just make some dang baskets two feet from the hoop. We beat Butler and we play the same Michigan State team to go to the championship game and face a Duke team that I think we could have beat. While I am extremely happy with where we went and our team I just keep wondering if we missed out on our own perfect storm and chance to compete for a national title. Everything has to line up sooooo perfectly and maybe this was it. Uggghh

This got really long, and I apologize. But then, I have a tendency to be long-winded anyway, right?

Here’s the thing. If you look at teams 66-96, you’re going to see that most of those teams are going to be mid-majors, most of the time anyway. Now, it won’t happen right away, that’s a given. And it might not happen at all if the bracket committee starts doing stuff like handing all the BCS conference schools first-round byes while letting the little guys eliminate one another, or giving a free pass to any BCS school who sucks so badly that they can only manage to go 16-15 but hey, that’s over .500, right?

(The first of my many asides during this treatise, and I apologize for its length but I think it’s necessary for context: I’ve argued before that we just don’t know how good a team like Murray State or Butler is coming into the tournament, because all we’ve seen them do is win, and their losses aren’t numerous enough to truly tell us anything about the team’s quality; for more information on the “just because a team loses doesn’t mean they suck” philosophy, please note the result of the Kansas-Northern Iowa game. A different way of looking at this is from the reverse angle: if Eastern Catholic finishes in 8th place after slogging through an 18-game conference season in the Giant Snob conference… well, I think we can pretty safely say that there are seven teams which are clearly better than they are. They’ve got enough common opponents to sort that thing out. If a person don’t think Murray State deserved an at-large had they lost their conference tournament, how in the HELL can they then justify a claim that, say, Illinois belonged in the field? Illinois finished behind four other teams in the standings, then didn’t even win a single Big Ten tournament game; Murray State would, under that circumstance, have had four losses total. I think one outweighs the other on its face, but when you then add in the fact that you don’t know what Murray State’s losses even say about them… yeah. Yet we all know that the common perception was that the Ohio Valley was a one-bid league, no matter who won that final game between Murray and Morehead; meanwhile, Illinois was being argued as an at-large candidate and was loudly decried as a snub after the selections were announced. So it seems apparent to me that there’s already a problem with the system.

Needless to say, Murray State would have been a lock with a 96-team field; I’d like to think that sanity would have prevailed and they’d have gotten into the 65 over Illinois even with a loss to Morehead. But you never know.)

Anyway, having gone off on that tangent… an equitable 96-team first round is going to result in more mid-majors notching tournament wins, even from the start. That means more money flowing toward the smaller conferences, and thus more program improvements.

It won’t level the playing field by any means, but it will incrementally narrow the gap (which, for conferences such as the A-10, Horizon, Valley, and Colonial has been narrowing anyway due to their tournament successes). The casual fan doesn’t often make this connection, but due to the way tournament revenues are distributed, the Horizon League as a whole has received a great number of slips of green paper over the last several years as a result of recent successes — you might not know this, but they get a second team into the dance about every other year (and three, one year), and they’ve at least won a first-round game six years in a row. That, and the league’s four Sweet Sixteen runs this last decade, has helped the league as a whole; while most people still think of them as a pissant little league, people who know what’s going on recognize that the league is actually full of quality programs which are only getting better because they’re getting more cash to work with. And now, thanks to Butler’s run, some of those Horizon schools might be able to double those basketball budgets, at least in the short term — budgets which have already been growing over the last 15 years precisely because they can play some ball. Think about that for a moment.

More importantly, though, I think that we’re used to the idea of “the big six” conferences, which is a construct that’s been drilled into us over the last decade due to the BCS in football and the birth of the “mid-major” term in basketball. But it wasn’t always the “big six”, obviously. Only idiots look back at the Magic-Bird game and refer to Indiana State as a “mid-major” — at the time, the Valley WAS a “major” conference. Prior to that, a lot of the powerful teams in the country weren’t even members of conferences. And then, more recently… from October 1984 through April 1990, there were a total of twelve national championships (real or mythical consensus) available to be won in the two primary revenue sports of football and men’s basketball. One-quarter of them were won by teams outside the current “power conferences”. It was the original expansions of the tournament — together with the subtle pressures of rewarding the “strongest” conferences with nonsense like giving their 19-11 eight-place team with a losing conference record an at-large bid — which created the financial disparities Kyle Whelliston rants about daily from November through March. In 1986, there was never any question that a Louisville could compete with teams from the SEC. In fact, even though people scoff at BYU’s 1984 football championship, the argument then was not that the WAC was a weak league — it was that BYU had romped through the league in a down year (and it was a horrible year for the rest of the WAC), and on top of that had played a crappy non-conference schedule. In 1984, the WAC was a perfectly respectable conference, and nobody questioned you for scheduling their teams; I’d argue that the BYU “controversy” and the WAC’s ill-fated expansion are chiefly responsible for people later perceiving the WAC (and then, of course, the Mountain West) as “always having been” a “lesser” conference.

Having said all that… I think that it might be a long, long time before we see a school which is already slogging along with a sub-$2M budget get as far as Butler did. That’s not the change I’m talking about; what I’m saying is that I think an expanded tournament will help some of these smaller conferences (or, as is the case with Gonzaga and Memphis and Xavier, individual teams from those conferences) claw their way up and be able to compete on a budgetary level with the big kids. And since we have a certain sense of how things should be at any given moment, their ascension will feel to us much the same way Butler’s run feels now, even if it’s something we really should have already seen coming.