College Basketball Post-Season Monday Rewind: The Men's Brackets Are Out

Basketball has spent two weeks sorting through the chaff, in some cases handing teams passes to the biggest stage and in others ending their seasons entirely. You know, sort of like suddenly and with a press release happened to K-State last night, although in the vast majority of cases it was more simple: a loss to end a miserable season.

Last night, we provided you with the NCAA Tournament bracket and the NIT bracket. (And JT provided you with the details of our official bracket contest, where -- just like college -- you'll only be playing for the love of the game rather than for wealth). There were some serious head-scratchers in the former; we're still waiting for someone to explain how Tulsa and Syracuse ended up in the NCAA field and why the top seeds in the NIT didn't. Tulsa, for their part, hadn't even gathered the team together for a watch party; if they didn't even think they had a shot at being called, what was the committee thinking?

John Calipari, speaking to ESPN in the middle of their surprising hour-long attack on the selection committee, elucidated the main issue although he was trying to explain why he thinks Kentucky only got a four seed rather than addressing the matter of mid-major representation. Every year, we hear a different story from the committee on what's important. Monmouth did what the committee has previously said to do: schedule hard, play on the road, win games. But this year, suddenly, the criteria changed. Top 50 wins, no matter where they happened, were what got Tulsa into the field.

It's absurd. But what's possibly more absurd is that ESPN went insane, ranting about Monmouth and Valparaiso and Saint Bonaventure being snubbed... yet when you go look at the NIT schedule, any guess as to which ESPN network those teams will be playing their first-round NIT games?

They won't, at least not on your television. Three teams that ESPN thinks deserved the spotlight of playing in the NCAA tournament don't even rate actual broadcast airtime on ESPN's cable networks. Valpo's on ESPN3 Tuesday so ESPN2 can give us Washington-Long Beach State. Monmouth and the Bonnies play the early games on Wednesday; they're on ESPN3 because ESPN2 is giving us Georgia-Belmont and ESPNU is feeding us Virginia Tech-Princeton.

Hypocrisy, thy name is television.

Understand, in real terms this isn't that much of a problem, although the majority of people are still going to be more inclined to watch games they can access on television and the relegation to ESPN3 means those games won't be splattered across televisions in bars and restaurants. It's the perception that matters here. You can't, as a network, be taken seriously when your journalistic and analytic talent are visibly outraged over snubs when your beancounters turn right around and snub the same teams.