COMMENTARY: SBC tournament seeding format is very impractical

Jackson Wolek / Staff Writer

jackson.wolek@fiusm.com

Jackson Wolek/ Staff Writer

The Sun Belt Conference may want to grow trees out of their seeds, but the roots are so gnarled it’s difficult to tell them apart.
Instead of having all 12 SBC teams make it this year, there will be only 11, because last place Louisiana Monroe failed to meet the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate. With 11 teams, the Sun Belt decided to take all of them, regardless of how difficult the task of seeding the teams has become.
The seeding goes like this: The number eight seed will face the number nine seed, six vs. 11, and seven vs. 10 on the first day of the tournament.
On the second day, the number four seed will play the number five seed, and depending on which team wins the eight vs. nine game, they will face either the East or West regular season champion (game six).
The same goes for the winner of the seven vs. 10 game (game seven), and the winner of the six vs. 11 game will face the number three overall seed (game eight).
In the semifinals, the winner of game five plays the winner of game six, and the winner of game seven plays the winner of game eight. The finals take the winners of those two games.
If this is at all confusing to you, don’t worry, it’s perplexing me too.
The Sun Belt can learn a thing or two from the Big South, which has 11 teams in their league, but can take only 10 because Presbyterian has not completed their Division One transition yet.
Therefore, the top six teams automatically make it to the second round, and the last four play each other in the first round to see who makes it to the quarterfinals. If the SBC took 10 teams, Troy would not make the tournament.
If leaving one team out wasn’t cruel enough, SBC could be like the 11-team Ohio Valley conference, which with SIU-Edwardsville ineligible because of NCAA transition, they have 10.
Instead of taking all 10, they take eight, with the top two seeds automatically making it into the semifinals, the three and four seed going straight to the quarterfinals and five through eight playing in the first round.
Thanks to this setup, the Panthers would not make the tournament. That may be just what FIU would need as motivation to do better during the season.
Since FIU is going to make the SBC tournament every year regardless if they win a single-game, the only real reason to do well is to get a better seed. If there was a possibility of not making the tournament all together, regular season games would hold a greater significance.
Not every team deserves a shot to go to the SBC tournament. For example, if ULM had been eligible, they would have made the post season with two wins in the season.
A team like that should not be rewarded with a chance to win the SBC tournament and get an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament, no matter how unlikely it would happen.
Also, the SBC can’t go to the extreme of the Ivy League and not have a tournament at all, and just take the team with the best record in the regular season.
A six-team tournament, with the top two teams getting a first round bye, just like how the NFL playoffs are run, is the best option for the SBC to go.
That way every conference game would have much greater implications than it does right now and you would get better competition and hopefully better fan support.
So, while ULM may have messed up a perfectly good 12 team tournament system, the SBC didn’t do a well enough job in making an 11 team conference have a better tournament bracket. By being too kind, they made things far more complicated than they should be.