We’re four days from Selection Monday. Conference tournament play has kicked off already around the country. It’ll be a fun and exciting week of college baseball — for the teams who are playing tournaments, at least.
Every year at this time, we run into questions about the optimal conference tournament structure. One simple suggestion I haven’t yet seen, though, balances all interests involved and adds an extra few hours of heart-pounding baseball. What more could conferences, teams and fans want?
Before getting to my proposed solution, I’ll run through some background on how conference tournaments currently work. If you’re familiar with the current structure, feel free to skip the next two paragraphs. For less well-versed college baseball fans, it’s important to understand how influential conference tournaments are on the NCAA tournament, where the sport is at its greatest.
Conferences are free to structure their tournaments however they please. Indeed, there’s no mandate to have a tournament at all. The Big West and Pac-12 simply play one extra regular-season series in the final week of the season. The Ivy League runs a three-game series between the top two teams in the league, hosted by the school with the top regular-season record. (Harvard swept Columbia last weekend at home to claim the Ivy League title). Some conferences include nearly all their members in the tournament, mixing play-in games and double elimination pools in a convoluted bracket. Others are much more selective, limiting the tournament to a handful of teams.
Conference tournaments take on outsized importance in comparison to the larger body of work of the regular season. This is especially true in “one-bid leagues.” Each conference is guaranteed at least one representative at the national tournament, with every league who has a conference tournament designating its tournament champion, not the regular-season leader, as its automatic representative. Whatever NCAA tournament spots not secured by automatic representatives are at the discretion of the selection committee, who typically populates the remaining field from the nation’s top conferences. Conferences whose only NCAA qualifier are its champion are deemed “one-bid leagues.”
My proposal is simple: one final game in each conference between the regular-season standings leader and the tournament champion. If the regular season champion also wins the conference tournament, nothing changes. That team is clearly deserving of the league’s automatic bid. It’s when the best regular-season performer falters in the tournament that the various leagues’ current structures fail.
One-bid leagues come down almost entirely to the conference tournament. Regular-season dominance means a higher seed in the tournament, sure, but the league’s national bid comes down entirely to a week’s worth of play. How does this make sense? We know about small sample vagaries in baseball. Teams’ three month body of work is obviously more representative of their talent levels than a four of five day stretch to close out the season. Yet one-bid leagues place their teams on a more-or-less equal footing in the final week of the season, with the league’s ultimate prize (the automatic bid) entirely up for grabs.
Take the 2019 Elon Phoenix for example. Boasting one of the nation’s top rotations, Elon handily won the Colonial Athletic Association regular-season title, at 19-5 in conference play. (Only one other team, the College of Charleston, finished within seven games of the Phoenix). Elon’s reward for such dominance: a first-round bye also gifted to Charleston. It’s an advantage, to be sure, but it’s not a disproportionate one. The CAA is going to be a one-bid league. If Elon stumbles twice next weekend, its season is over. A less deserving club will represent the CAA instead. Why wouldn’t the Colonial want to put its best foot forward in the national spotlight? Reducing Elon’s season to a historical footnote and the moral victory of a regular-season title makes no sense.
But conference tournaments are fun, right? If we eliminate conference tournaments and only consider teams’ regular season resumés in filling out the national tournament field, we might end up with a more deserving, competitive group, but we’ll miss out on the excitement of the final week. Worse, we’ll bury teams who got off to bad starts. Kick off your season on a four or five-game losing streak in a one-bid league, and you might as well pack it in.
Even in multi-bid conferences, the lack of a conference tournament can be fatal. As Mike Rooney recently lamented, Arizona has been playing well lately, having won 10 of 11 in May. Because the Pac-12 is one of two conferences who doesn’t play a tournament, they’ll close out their season with a three-game set against the conference’s worst team, Washington State. Sweeping the Cougars won’t impress anyone. Arizona’s season will end with a whimper, even though they’re rolling on all cylinders.
Maybe Mike is the only one who will shed a tear for a Wildcat team who went 1-8 against UCLA, Stanford and Oregon State, the Pac-12’s three best clubs. Arizona had its chances early in the season, and they didn’t take advantage. Because of that, they’re on the outside looking in.
But college baseball’s an entertainment industry, first and foremost. Why have teams dead and buried by March if we don’t have to? If a team finishes its season on a roll, why not give them another chance to pad their resumes against quality opponents? (Relatedly, I highly recommend this look by Mark Etheridge on the significance of the upcoming SEC tournament, where Florida, Missouri and Auburn all hang on the bubble with a chance to play themselves solidly into the national field).
The final, if necessary, regular-season champion vs. tournament champion showdown balances these interests. Dominate for an entire year, and you get something of a mulligan in the season’s final week, one final opportunity to right the ship and claim conference supremacy. Struggle early and get hot late, and you too, have a chance. You’ll get another end-of-season crack at the conference’s elite in the tournament, and so long as you keep winning, you’ll get one final game for the conference’s automatic bid.
The final game would also add a layer of strategic intrigue, as Johnny Edman pointed out on Twitter.
Coming back to Elon, how would Mike Kennedy handle his pitching staff? He’s got George Kirby, a true ace who will come off the board in the top half of the first round in a few weeks. Does he pitch Kirby early on, hoping to double up on the regular season and tournament titles and avoid the play-in game altogether? Or does he hold his ace back, hope his team makes a run at the tournament title without him, knowing the worst-case scenario is a do-or-die game with one of college baseball’s best arms on the mound?
Most importantly, though, the final game makes for great TV. Chaos is exciting, and a Cinderella squaring off against the team who has been the class of the league all year for the title of true “conference champion” should sell. MLB introduced the wild-card play-in games a few years ago, and despite some handwringing, they’ve been well-received. Viewers tune in, teams have more pressure to win their divisions during the regular-season, more teams can squint and hope to salvage their season with a late miracle run. Elon-Charleston (or whomever else makes a conference tournament run) for the CAA championship won’t draw Yankees-A’s ratings, but it would be a way to put the CAA on the national radar for a few hours.
I don’t see many drawbacks to the final play-in. Maybe pitching staffs would get stretched a little thin, but coaches could patch something together, just as they would if a game unexpectedly goes to extra innings. Teams would get more control over their own destiny. One-bid regular season champions needn’t feel that one bad day negated an entire season’s worth of good work. Arizona wouldn’t have to wonder “what-if” they had one last crack at UCLA and Stanford; they’d get it. The conference tournament would remain a thrilling spectacle, with a few extra hours potentially thrown on for good measure.