The court pictured above is one of the NCAA’s standardized “Stepford Courts,” with the familiar logo in the middle, the black bordering, and the clear lanes. (Stepford Courts must die, but of course, that’s why they exist. We wouldn’t want each NCAA tournament venue to retain its originality…) Yet, savvy observers will identify the building as UD Arena, the home of the Dayton Flyers and the annual site of the First Four.
Let’s start out by saying that the First Four is a great idea for a number of reasons. First of all, the event is wholeheartedly supported by the Dayton community. Residents embrace this two-day party, especially in terms of adopting the four No. 16 seeds that don’t (can’t) bring along huge fan bases.
Dayton is a city which loves its college basketball. The hometown Flyers were a legitimate powerhouse program in the 1960s under a superb head coach, Don Donoher, whose multi-decade tenure lasted long enough to witness a stirring run to the Elite Eight in 1984. When Dayton lost to Georgetown in the West Regional final, it did so in UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion, which was eerily fitting. In 1967, 17 years earlier, Donoher guided Dayton to the 1967 national championship game. The team waiting for the Flyers in that final showdown was none other than UCLA. The first great Lew Alcindor team stopped Dayton in the final, but the Flyers had captured the locals’ hearts, and that affection continues today. It’s a love affair so passionate and spacious that it leaves room for college basketball teams other than Dayton itself. The First Four is held in the right city.
The other really big reason the First Four is an inspired idea is that it gives two No. 16 seeds a chance to win a game. A lot of casual sports fans might not care about the 16-seed First Four games, which open Tuesday and Wednesday nights’ doubleheader slates, but the instructive point to make is that NCAA tournament victories bring about “win shares” for the winning conference. You win a game, your conference gets a nice extra slice of revenue. The small one-bid conferences represented in the First Four are receiving crucial infusions of revenue with these win shares, outlined in good detail here and explained in a more general context here.
The First Four really works as an idea.
The problem is the implementation of it, and not the games involving No. 16 seeds, either.
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The unfortunate reality of the 2015 First Four is that while the games with the 16 seeds will not cause any concern in the college basketball community, the two “bubble” First Four games — involving the last four at-large teams to make the field of 68 — have both attached themselves to the C-word: Controversy. For different reasons, the BYU-Ole Miss (Tuesday) and Boise State-Dayton (Wednesday) games have become problems… problems the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee should have been able to steer clear of.
The Boise State-Dayton First Four game on Wednesday is a readily obvious source of controversy, for the simple reasons that Dayton:
A) has been forced to play this game when it should have been locked into the round of 64 at a Thursday or Friday subregional site;
and
B) owns home-court advantage for an NCAA tournament game.
We covered the issue in greater depth in this piece from Selection Sunday evening. Fans across the country immediately grasped and became aware of the absurdity of this particular situation.
However, later on Sunday night, the other “bubble” First Four game between BYU and Ole Miss became much more of a problem than it ever needed to be, and that’s what we’re going to talk about in the remainder of this piece.
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The story of the BYU-Ole Miss controversy can be traced back to the inaugural First Four, which emerged in 2011 when the NCAA tournament expanded from 65 to 68 teams.
In that initial First Four, Clemson and UAB played the Tuesday “bubble” game. As you can see in this link, the tip-off time was very late. The “bubble” games are always the nightcaps in these Tuesday and Wednesday doubleheaders (the 16 seeds play first in the early evening hours), but on that Tuesday night in 2011, the first game ran long. Clemson’s win over UAB didn’t finish until roughly midnight Eastern time. The Tigers ideally needed a Friday-Sunday opening-weekend pod, but the limits of bracketing and scheduling have to be taken into consideration. The Tuesday First Four games feed into Thursday-Saturday sites, while the Wednesday First Four games feed into Friday-Sunday sites. That’s the way things are, and that’s the way things should be under the circumstances.
The problem with Clemson’s Thursday game against West Virginia — an entirely preventable error — was that it started at 12:15 p.m. Eastern, the earliest possible tip time on any NCAA tournament day.
This was and still is patently absurd. There’s no way to avoid feeding the Tuesday First Four game into a Thursday pod — that’s not the issue here. The obvious issue is that any team having to play a First Four game should automatically, without any debate, receive the late-night time slot for its round-of-64 game. Clemson had a turnaround of barely 36 hours from the end of its game in Dayton late Tuesday night to the start of its game in Tampa early Thursday afternoon. Travel and logistics ate up several of those hours. Given the very early start on Thursday, the Tigers faced nothing remotely like a normal game-preparation routine. Predictably, they lost.
Playing a First Four bubble game is difficult enough. The subsequent round-of-64 game should not be turned into a daunting logistical challenge akin to a presidential campaign’s insane plane-hopping and state-touring in the final week before the election. When Clemson was put through that ridiculous obstacle course in 2011, the point was supposed to be clear: First Four bubble teams were supposed to get night-session assignments in the round of 64, and specifically the late-game slots in said night sessions.
Well, so much for that in 2015.
It was announced Sunday night — you can see this on the 2015 NCAA Tournament bracket in the West Region, in the bottom-left corner of the screen — that the winner of Tuesday’s BYU-Ole Miss First Four game will play an afternoon game (4:10 Eastern) on Thursday in Jacksonville, Florida. The Xavier Musketeers are a good team, but they don’t deserve the built-in advantage of getting to play a day session game against a weary foe that will have had to make a quick flight from Ohio for this contest.
This is not up for debate. BYU or Ole Miss versus Xavier should be a late-night tip on Thursday, period. If you look again at the bracket, you’ll notice in the upper-right corner of the screen that the Boise State-Dayton winner’s round-of-64 East Region game against Providence on Friday is slated for a 10 p.m. Eastern time tip. That’s what BYU and Ole Miss should have received on Thursday.
Why is this all so hard? Why are both First Four games attached to very basic errors in terms of bracketing (Boise-Dayton) or scheduling (BYU-Ole Miss)?
The First Four is a great concept, and an event which helps small conferences in the area where they need it most: their coffers. Dayton loves the two-day festival — there’s so much to love about this event from several different vantage points.
Yet, giving Dayton a home game and putting the BYU-Mississippi winner through a brutal travel schedule show that more oversight needs to be brought to the bracketing and scheduling processes. Will the powers that be in college basketball be willing to let more sunlight into their (Indianapolis) room?
Don’t bet on it… but it certainly needs to happen.