Re: 2016 NCAA Tournament Thread
Salem State and Salve both getting demolished by 7-1 scores...
Gotta love those extraneous AQs; they almost never advance, but at least they pour a lot of money into the collective D-3 pot via their lucrative conference tournaments.
Extraneaous? I would argue you don't understand how the NCAA approaches its championships.
These are not tournaments of the best "x" number of teams in the country. Never have been.* They are
national tournaments with representatives of the member conferences, with at large bids to round out the field.
Let's take D1 hoops as the example and go from there.
These aren't the best 68 teams which will be chosen tonight. There are the 32 automatic bids, then the next 36 at-large teams. It's clear that the NCAA wants it this way because of the Cinderella factor. Think Florida Gulf Coast from a few years ago. Likely wouldn't have been most people's list of the best 68 teams. But with its conference getting an automatic bid, they get in, win a couple of games, and become a media darling.
I doubt that most people believe that Holy Cross (14-19), Austin Peay (18-17), Fairleigh Dickinson (18-14), or even teams with good/decent records such as Stony Brook (26-6) and Wisconsin-Green Bay (23-12) are one of the best 68 teams in the nation or, for the most part, better than the 7/8th place team in the ACC, Big Ten or SEC. But it doesn't matter. It is a NATIONAL tournament with representation reflecting the wide makeup of the NCAA.
The unfortunate part, from the D3 hockey perspective, is that while the bouncyball people have more at-large bids in the money-gorging D1 tournament than auto-bids, we only have the four non-AQ bids. But the approach remains the same: be a member of a conference meeting the qualifying standards, and you will be a part of this NATIONAL tournament.
And, I don't think it's going to change. Realistically, maybe only teams from the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, PAC 12, SEC, and Big East have a chance to win the D1 tourney. But the Horizon League's Butler getting to the title game helps define March Madness. And that also means there are many more teams in the 25 other conferences with votes at the convention that want to make sure they have a seat at the table, as it were. In D3 hockey, I doubt even the 'power conferences' would say "Sure, take away our automatic bid so we might be able to get a third team in the tournament." I would think they want that safety net for perceived "down" years.
You may think that because of the lopsided losses that Salem State and Salve are extraneaous. I would argue their presence is the
very point of the tournament. Earn your way in, and you have chance. Holy Cross CAN beat Minnesota. (Yeah!).
* The only exception might be track, where it's not teams that advance, but the team title is given to the school that accumulates the most points based on its individual qualifiers. But that's not really a team-vs.team situation because no school is putting up its full roster/depth against another. It's a different methodology than basketball, volleyball, football, baseball, hockey, soccer, etc etc and so on.
