BracketBuzzkillers

Last weekend, for the ninth consecutive season, the BracketBusters event was held, pitting mid-majors against each other in non-conference matchups. Unsurprisingly, the marquee matchups featured teams from the Horizon League, CAA, Missouri Valley, WCC, and WAC.

The big winners were Utah State, who beat St. Mary's on the road, and the Colonial's potential three-bid triumvirate of VCU, Old Dominion, and George Mason. The predominant losers in the TV games were the MVC's Wichita State, Missouri State plus the aforementioned Gaels out of the WCC. All three would be well-advised to win their conference tournaments as a result if they want to play in the NCAA Tournament.

However, there were more losers that didn't come close to any airtime.

When BracketBusters began, it was a more limited endeavor than it is now, featuring just 18 teams in 2003. By 2006, that number was up to 100, and the vast majority of contests were non-televised featuring mid- to lower-level teams in various conferences. This year, that number was up to a record 114, or a full third of Division I.

In some cases, conferences lock all or most of their teams into playing BracketBuster games, regardless of projected preseason quality or how good the team is at the time the matchups are decided upon.

The most ridiculous example of this situation featured the game between the Big Sky's Sacramento State and the Ohio Valley's Southeast Missouri. Each school has an RPI in the 300s, and Southeast Missouri had to make a nearly 2,000 mile trip on about three weeks notice after the matchups were released. The Redhawks, in the most recent data released last season, spend less than $1 million on basketball expenses, ranking 261st in the country.

Such a BudgetBuster is not unique to 2011. A year ago, Youngstown State was shipped out to California-Riverside in a game similar in significance to the Sacramento State-Southeast Missouri clash of this year. This failure lies at the feet of ESPN, who coordinate the matchups with too much of an eye on RPI similarity.

One of the benefits of BracketBusters used to be that the road team of a game was guaranteed to host the team they were playing the next season. For schools that struggle to fill schedules, some of whom play an inordinate amount of time on the road and at neutral sites before New Year's, this was something that could offset the unexpected travel. After scheduling issues arose with that requirement, and with some schools failing to honor the regulation, the powers that be relaxed the rule to returning the game within the next two seasons.

The aim of BracketBusters is, of course, to give mid-majors television time near NCAA time and to provide them opportunities at quality wins that they may have limited opportunities for in their respective leagues.

The television time aspect was more relevant in a time when ESPN still had an NHL contract to uphold, before ESPNU was born and before the online platform of ESPN3 was available. Now, ESPNU shows mid-majors on several nights of the week, and ESPN2 often has games from non-power conferences on Saturdays. ESPN3 allows most people with broadband internet access from a major service provider to watch even more mid-major games. Internet streaming on other sites gives those who want more basketball further options.

The conferences that, year-in and year-out provide the most teams for the TV games of BracketBusters are from the conferences that do have a non-trivial amount of games on ESPNU and ESPN2 to begin with, like the CAA, Horizon, MVC, WCC, and WAC.

Teams in this year's event that won marquee matchups did get a profile boost, but it comes at the cost of playing a zero-sum game for mid-majors as a whole. The CAA's success at the hands of Wichita State, Missouri State, and Cleveland State likely confined the Missouri Valley to a one-bid league for the fourth straight season and probably did the same to Cleveland State's at-large candidacy. George Mason, who had just come off of a huge win at VCU last Tuesday to essentially sew up the CAA regular-season title, had nothing to gain by playing a Northern Iowa team that faded from the Valley title race earlier in the month. The Patriots won, and will almost surely be in the tournament.

In the time before BracketBusters, mid-majors still received at-large bids. In the eight years since BracketBusters began, the conferences most likely to participate in the event have collected 25 at-large bids at a rate of just over three per year. The same conferences totaled 31 at-larges in the previous eight years before BracketBusters, for nearly four per year. The event may have helped certain teams improve seeding or get into the field for a single year, but its presence has not made it likelier for mid-majors to get into the NCAA tournament.

Yet another problem lies in the fact that for many of the involved conferences, BracketBusters falls with only a week to go in those teams' regular seasons, at the business end of conference play. In the midst of teams competing for conference titles and vital conference tournament seeding, BracketBusters represents an unnecessary focus away from league play.

One of the biggest surprises of this year's event was Valparaiso's home win over Missouri State. Valpo put on an impressive offensive display, scoring a phenomenal 1.27 points per possession against a team that had allowed 0.99 a trip in Valley play. On Monday, with a share of the league title on the line were they to win out, the Crusaders bottled it on the road against a middling Wisconsin-Green Bay team. Did Valpo lose because it got to full of itself after the BracketBusters win? Only the great Homer Drew knows that. But the Crusaders did have to get out of the mindset of Horizon League league play they had been in so they could face the Bears, and lost 48 hours after playing the non-conference game.

If ESPN truly wanted to showcase the best possible mid-major games on a single weekend, they could somehow work with the conferences to make some type of flexible scheduling arrangement for the four conference games the week of and the week after the BracketBusters scheduling. Teams scheduled to play home games would be locked into playing home games in the event, so as not to disrupt the plans of season ticket holders. Using this framework would not only prevent teams from having to play non-conference games at the most important part of the conference season, it could allow ESPN to show the most important games mid-majors can play during the regular season: those that decide a conference title.

As it stands now, though, BracketBusters represents a diversion in the college basketball season that is unnecessary to the teams involved and claims objectives that are increasingly either irrelevant or downright false.