Nine.
That’s the number of Big East teams that lost in the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament. The result? A national uproar.
As Sunday’s games finished up, Charles Barkley made waves in his new gig as one of CBS’s tournament analysts, ripping the Big East while sitting directly across the desk from Louisville head coach Rick Pitino.
“The Big Least as I like to call it, or the Small East... is the most overrated conference in the world,” Barkley said. “The Big East should have never gotten 11 teams into the tournament.”
While Pitino proceeded to defend his conference as best he could, the second-straight year of Big East teams underperforming has left college basketball fans calling openly for a shake-up in the allocation of Tournament bids.
But ACC fans should be careful in calling for this, as recent history suggests the ACC is just as overrated as the Big East, at least when it comes to the first few rounds of March Madness (not counting the ACC’s national title success).
Over the last five years, 21-of-40 Big East teams have been forced out of the Tournament in upset fashion compared to 14-of-28 ACC squads. Even this year, ACC enthusiasts ought to hearken back to 2009 before gloating too loudly after getting three teams into the Sweet 16. That year, North Carolina overshadowed the rest of the conference’s shortcomings by winning the NCAA Championship. Looking back, though, five of the six other conference teams lost prematurely. No. 5 seed Florida State went down to No. 12 Wisconsin. No. 4 Wake Forest got overturned by No. 13 Cleveland State. And while No. 10 Maryland earned the ACC’s only upset by beating No. 7 California, the Terrapins were quickly dispatched in the second round.
What conference has attained an appropriate number of bids?
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Big 10 has had the best postseason performers in the past five years. It is the only conference to create more upsets than it has succumbed to, as six of their teams fell early while nine others beat higher-seeded opponents. There’s a reason Michigan State fans refer to the month of March as “Izzo”: the Spartans had five upsets in four years before 2011, skewing the conference statistics.
Despite this, don’t expect a change in the way the NCAA Tournament selection committee goes about its process of extending bids. For starters, the NCAA has shown in recent years—see the BCS system—that it is unwilling to budge on issues that would cost it money, even at the expense of providing equal competitive footing. Plus, the aforementioned statistics only indicate that teams from both the Big East and ACC have been seeded too high, not that they were undeserving of a spot in the bracket.
The Big 10 has been the toughest conference all year per Ken Pomeroy’s college basketball metrics, but the Big East has the most teams in the nation’s top-50. The problem is at the top, where Pittsburgh is the only team to break Pomeroy’s top-10. In contrast, the ACC ranks fourth overall behind the Big 12.
Also, Barkley and many college basketball fans have begun to cite “East Coast bias” as a rapidly-growing problem among college basketball media. According to The New York Times’ Nate Silver, the Big East gets 50 percent more media coverage than the Big Ten. In part, this is the Big 10’s own fault for promoting a low-possession, defense-oriented style of play as its hallmark. As Silver continues to say, though, the average Big East game sees just as many foul calls as the Big 10, and the East Coast has teams that play at an undoubtedly-Midwestern pace. The ACC’s coverage, on the other hand, is tied closely to Mike Krzyzewski and Roy Williams and their respective fan bases, which produce enough television viewers and internet hits for the entire conference.
At the end of the day, Barkley’s antagonizing presence on the set and constant criticism of the Big East brought delight to many ACC fans. But supporters of the Blue Devils’ conference should watch out, though, because at the pace he’s moving, Barkley will be preaching about the mediocre ACC before Duke gets to Anaheim.
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