Jay Bilas joins Scott Van Pelt on SportsCenter to preview the ACC Tournament beginning on Tuesday, discuss Indiana State’s loss to Drake in the Missouri Valley Conference Tournament title game, review the top-5 Mountain West teams and debate whether the current NCAA Tournament bid system is unfair due to automatic conference champion bids.
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I will always rather see a 28-29 win non conference winning mid-major in the tournament than the 8th place Big 10 (or other major conference) team
In the end, smaller conferences have the choice to have the conference regular season champ get the automatic bid or the tournament champ. Seeing as the tournaments are never in a 100% neutral environment, it means that the best team, not only has to win 3 or 4 more games in a row, but one of those teams may be playing with a near home court advantage. Those smaller conferences have a better chance of getting a first round win from their 10th seed 28-5 regular season champ than their 15th seed 20-12 conference tourney champ.
I do crack up that Jay Bilas made it sound like the top 5 teams in the MWC would all have worse records if they played in the ACC though. The Big 12 is a much stronger conference than the ACC since 2020 and Houston came in from a conference that was similar in strength to the MWC and finished 15-3 on top of the Big 12. It's not even Houston's best team the last 4 years and certainly not it's healthiest (3 players out for the season). Virginia won the national championship in 2019 and hasn't had a tourney win since. Duke and North Carolina have a combined 2 Sweet 16 appearances since 2020. The ACC aint what it use to be. When you do your brackets this year, flip a coin when a MWC team is matched up against an ACC team.
The top conferences all get 6-10 teams in the tournament while everybody else gets 1 or 2. Yes, the current system is very much unfair. As a Marshall guy, I follow the Sun Belt. On the men’s side, James Madison won the auto bid and I believe App State deserves to get in as well. On the women’s side, Marshall won the auto bid and I believe James Madison deserves to get in as well. The lower conferences deserve more chances at auto bids.
Will Jay Bilas speak out on Flip the trip and
Duke fans actions at end of game
Until then Jay Bilas needs to make no comments on anything off the court
Imagine the ‘23 Carolina Panthers showing up as the 16 seed in an NFC playoff tournament, just a few wins away from reaching the Super Bowl.
These conference tournaments are ridiculous.
I don’t think it’s unfair. Those schools get no respect for their wins. This systems gives them a chance. If it changes no mid major would make it.
Acc never gets any love, they have had 3 teams in the last 2 years in the final 4
I think it’s a little bit unfair. You got teams winning conferences with worse records than teams that finish in the top 3 in a power 5 conference that don’t make it
68 before the conf tourneys as Jay said — then — if a non-68 team wins a conf tourney – let the conf decide which team from that conf is replaced by the conf tourney champ.
I’m tired of Jay Bilas. I can’t get that disastrous PMT interview out of my brain.
Big 12 sucks
My criticism EVERY year is that really good mid-major and small-conference teams ALWAYS get slighted in favor of mediocre major-conference teams who can’t even win half of their conference games. It still bothers me that a really good Monmouth team (years ago) beat 5 major conference teams, and was left out of the field in favor of mediocre major-conference teams. Like Bilas says, the tourney is foolproof. It’s always great no matter which teams are in. But it would be soooooooooo much better, imho, with a bunch of really good unknown teams that can take down the giants who may or may not truly deserve to be there. I may be in the minority, but I’d much prefer to watch teams JMU, Indiana St, Appalachian St, Grand Canyon, and McNeese, but odds are that some of them won’t get in.
Virginia loses 4 of their last 15 : I know their resume says they should be in but vibes say they should be out. Wisconsin loses 9 of their last 15 : 6 seed.
y’all do know this rule is gonna change once conference realignment happens right?
Good luck to duke