the nonsense side of March Madness

Want to know why I don't like college basketball? I'll tell you why! It has the most meaningless regular season of any league and sport.

The problem is Conference Tournaments. Conference Tournaments are the stupidest and most redundant creations in sports.

What is the purpose? #1: To crown the conference champion? Hello, we already have a conference champion, that's what we've been doing the last four months. #2 Find out who's the best teams? Dude, the NCAA tournament comes right after! That is the real tournament. #3: To get the country's best teams into the NCAA Tournament? Actually, the Conference Tourneys do nothing more than water down the Big Dance. #4 Make the NCAA Tournament more exciting? Fail, it only precedes bigger blowouts.

Here are a few examples:

-Coastal Carolina is champion of the Big South, as they went 15-3 in the conference and 28-6 overall. However, Winthrop, 3rd in the Big South with 12 wins (16-13 overall in the regular season) got hot and won 3 games in a row to win the Conference Tournament and replace Coastal Carolina for the NCAA Tourney, despite being the lesser team. Up next: 16 seed, blowout loss to someone like Kansas.

-Weber State went 13-3 to win the Big Sky Conference. Montana was 10-6 but will represent the Big Sky in the NCAA Tournament.

-East Tennesee was 5th in the Atlantic Sun Conference this season. But that doesn't matter, they stole a ticket to March Madness.

-UConn has lost 6 straight conference tournament games, but has still made the Elite Eight twice in the last four years.

-Stony Brook is conference champion, but either Vermont or Boston University will also be champions of the same conference. Kind of an odd predicament.

-The March Madness Tournament has 65 teams, but either Washington or Arizona State, ranked 50 and 56 respectively, won't be in. Memphis is #46 and will also likely get left out, replaced by East Tennessee State and Winthrop, schools somewhere ranked around #150.

So March Madness is probably the most followed sporting event in America. Everybody fills out a bracket: secretaries, 5th graders, librarians, politicians, etc. And yet the 65 spots are not filled by the 65 best teams. And this is why a 16 seed has never beaten a 1 seed, and only one 2 seed has ever fallen to a 15 seed. The regular season doesn't matter. And why there is a need for back-to-back tournaments? And with the possibility and likelihood of two conference champions, both outshadow the other. (I won the regular season crown but the conference tourney, I won the conference tourney crown but finished 4th in the regular season.) Neither one matters anymore.

Each Conference Tournament champion receives an automatic bid to the NCAA Tourney. Nevermind those schools that slugged it out for five months to win their conference outright, their spot can be taken by a team that has one good week. And because of that, another even better school, who would be more competitive against the good teams, will get left out.

I guess it's just an excuse to give everybody a ribbon, just like 5th grade. There are no losers, everybody is successful.

So forget the four months of games you've played, the only ones that matter are in that one week in the middle of March.