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| Tacoma head coach Carl Howell and assistant RJay Barsh celebrate the 2012 NWAACC title. |
KENNEWICK, WASH. - In the hours following Tacoma Community
College
The man, who
had a group of young men in tow, was none other than Carl Howell, the head
coach of the NWAACC champion Tacoma Titans. He walked down the table of
volunteers, shaking hands with many until he reached executive director Marco
Azurdia, where he stopped to exchange a few words before making his way to
another corner of the establishment where his team and assistant coaches as
well as his wife and son awaited him.
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| Tacoma head coach Carl Howell |
What Howell
mentioned was that it may be time to seed the tournament, and not in the way it
is now. The current format pits the Northern region against the Southern Region
and the East against the West. The top finisher in one region takes on the
fourth place finisher in the other, and the second place team takes on the
third place squad.
In a
perfect world, that should seed the tournament equally. The opponent in the
first round of the tournament is solely based on how a team performed in the
regular season. However, the world isn’t perfect. The wrench that is thrown
into this system is that the regions are far from equal, and so in some cases,
the team that took fourth in the East may actually be better than the team that
won the West.
That
disparity is painfully obvious on the women’s side, enough that several league
officials said they weren’t at all surprised when seven of the eight teams from
the Northern and Western regions were beaten on the first day, only to see the
remaining team lose on the following day.
The method
to fix this broken system is simple, and it’s already used at the college level
for the NCAA basketball tournaments. What happens is that the winner of most of
the conferences gets an automatic bid to the tournament. The rest of the bids
are called “at-large bids” and are chosen by a selection committee. The
committee is made up of athletic directors and conference commissioners from
across the country, and they decide which teams are the most deserving to
receive an invitation to the NCAA tournament.
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| Tacoma Guard Mark McLaughin |
The problem
with that system is that it is subjective to the people sitting on the
committee, and it is entirely up to them to decide who gets in and who doesn’t.
Once the teams are chosen, coaches, players and fans alike would argue that
their team deserved a higher seed than they were given. It’s not based solely
on wins and losses, and so the ambiguity of the selection would unsettle some
until the system had time to take hold.
Despite its
drawbacks, a system like this should effectively eliminate the imbalance
between the conferences. Because it would be in accordance to rankings and not
records, there wouldn’t be as many first round match ups that pitted two top
eight teams against one another. Sure, there would still be plenty of Cinderella
moments, such as this year when the Clark and Whatcom men were both ranked No.
1 and lost in the first round. That’s just basketball. But it would mean that
the sixteen best teams would get in to the tournament, instead of a good team
being left at home because they finished fifth in the best region in the
league.
At the end
of the day, this system works. A champion is crowned every year and there aren’t
too many complaints about how it works. That said, as the league continues to
try to grow in popularity, they may need to make the switch to a format that
people are used to and understand. Besides, people could start having selection
Sunday parties.
