Anytime the two highest-seeded teams remaining in the NCAA tournament meet in a national semifinal instead of the title game, the drumbeats to reseed the field prior to the Final Four inevitably sound.
The thought process is if the two best remaining teams can't meet until the title game, it's more fair and reduces the chances of the sort of anticlimactic finale TV executives dread.
The presence of 11th-seeded VCU and eighth-seeded Butler in one of Saturday's semifinals and third-seeded UConn and fourth-seeded Kentucky in the other has reignited this debate anew this season. What proponents of reseeding tend to overlook, however, is how impractical the idea would be to implement.
First and foremost, reseeding would ruin office pools. Very few entrants even had UConn and Kentucky advancing to the Final Four, but those who did can't be expected to have projected they would be the two highest-seeded teams remaining and thus be on opposite sides of the bracket.
Even if you ignore office pools, there are other reasons not to reseed.
The seeds that the selection committee doled out three weeks ago are no longer representative of where these teams stand after four or five NCAA tournament victories apiece. Since VCU has defeated the likes of Kansas, Purdue, Georgetown, Florida State and USC, are the Rams clearly still the weakest of the four teams based on resume?
And while this year's Final Four features four different seeds, how would you decide who faces whom in a year when two of the last four survivors were No. 1 seeds? Or worse yet, when all four Final Four teams are the same seed, like when the four 1 seeds advanced to San Antonio in 2008?
Arguments over seeding make for good first-week fodder between Selection Sunday and tip-off on Thursday morning. By the time Final Four week comes around, the focus should be on the games, not on seeding.
Dido Joss Stone Majandra Delfino Maria Bello Jennifer Gareis
No comments:
Post a Comment