Sports
Column: The new Big Ten Tournament betrays the spirit of college basketball – The Crimson Quarry
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It’s not the organization. I get that. It’s about the principle.
Domination.
It’s March 13th, 2021 at Madison Square Garden, the nation’s most venerable basketball arena. Patrick Ewing, a legend of the garden, has a smile on his face, a hat on his head and a pair of scissors in his hands as a summits a ladder under one of the rims.
The hat reads “2021 BASKETBALL CHAMPIONS – BIG EAST.”
Ewing’s 8-seeded Hoyas had just spent 40 minutes demolishing the 2-seed Creighton Blue Jays as he earned the distinction of becoming the first individual to win the Big East as a player and a coach.
Across the country, orange and black confetti is descending from the rafters of T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. The 5-seed Oregon State Beavers punched their ticket to the NCAA Tournament with their first Pac-12 Tournament title following a win over the 3-seed Colorado Buffaloes.
These teams had something in common: neither was projected to receive an at-large bid in that year’s NCAA Tournament. But they made it, because that’s how college basketball works. Or at least, how it did.
Not anymore.
Now four Pac-12 teams are in the Big Ten. Two Big 12 teams are in the SEC. Oregon State doesn’t even have a stable home anymore. The chance it was given and made good on in the conference tournament? No longer guaranteed.
With 18 (lol) teams in the Big Ten, having all of them together in one city, one arena, for a conference tournament just sounds like a logistical nightmare. But it’s not like that was an inevitability. The league added those teams. Nobody else prepared that paperwork. It did.
As a result, the bottom three teams in the league’s final standings will not receive an invite to the tournament. Problem solved!
There were mixed reactions to this change. Some didn’t care. “If you want to be in the tournament, win games,”. Others took issue.
Here’s the thing: I get it. Totally. An 18-team conference tournament just sounds awful. How are you going to accommodate all those teams? All those fans? What would the schedule look like? Who earns a bye?
But you, a fan, shouldn’t care about the logistics or whatever. That’s someone else’s job. They’re getting paid to plan this stuff. Figure it out. And this isn’t about logistics either. It’s about the principle.
For decades now, the path to a national championship has been open to every single division-I program in the country regardless of regular season results. Just win however many games in a row one way or another and you’re in the big bracket with a chance to make March mad.
The beauty of college basketball is that anything can happen. Anything. A 16-seed can beat a 1-seed. Blue Bloods can lose to a mid-major on their home floor. Cinderella’s slipper can fit year after year. Oregon State can go from being outside the field to the Elite Eight. And a last place team can play its way into March Madness*.
*Unless it’s a Big Ten team. In which case, kick rocks.
Every kid who grows up with a ball in their hands has a voice nailed down in their head (Nantz, Walton, Raftery, truly pick any one) that they evoke to themselves between dribbles in the driveway. In their head they’re bringing the ball up the court in the closing seconds of an elimination matchup as a lower seed.
“Five seconds on the clock… puts it up for three… GOT IT.”
Do these things happen often? No, of course not. If they did they wouldn’t be notable. Special. Memorable. But they’ve always been given the opportunity to happen. Until now.
Trust me, you don’t need to cut the Big Ten any slack over how that many teams would make for a weird tournament. Again, and I cannot emphasize this enough, the conference made the decision to expand on its own. You can talk about competing with the SEC or whatever but the Big Ten opened this door and went through it.
It’s nobody else’s fault but theirs that they didn’t like what was inside.
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