MAC Men's Basketball Tournament Returns to Original Format

Heeding the wishes (according to this story in the Plain Dealer) of its coaches, the MAC Men's Basketball program is abandoning the current tournament format and moving to a more traditional one.

Currently, the top 2 teams get a bye to the semi finals and the next two teams get a bye to the quarterfinal.  The Bottom 8 teams play two rounds before they meet one of the top four seeds.

The new format will be what was for many years the traditional format.  Four byes, but only into the quarter final.

I might have been the only person who liked the "super bye" format the way it was.  It created huge drama in the end of the regular season, meaningfully rewarded teams for excelling in the regular season and helped (in theory) ensure that the tournament produced the MAC's best team for the NCAAs.

The stated criticism in the story is a fair one:  when you have a close season, as you did this year, you have incredibly significant seeding decisions being made based on tie breakers that slice increasingly thinly the deeper they get.  The MAC had a three-way tie for first and one of those teams was going to be at a disadvantage.

And while the same could happen when separating a #5 seed from a #4 seed under the system that will be in place next year, the impact isn't as great.

I think the unstated reason is that every coach wants to be able to save their season in the tournament and this made that a lot harder. Under the system we are going to, you can spread the wealth a little, which is good for Coaches under pressure to succeed.

On the plus side, this does set up the tournament for a Cinderella run, and when OU made a run of that kind, they ended up winning a game in the NCAA.  My bias is always to weight things toward the regular season, which is the best test of which team is best, but that's clearly out of step with the way the world is viewing things.