Courtney Banghart said that she felt that the regular season winner should be awarded the NCAA bid.

6-8 worked for Penn last year. Yay.

You maybe correct that a 4th bid winner might be a short-term boost for the IL Tournament but a 40 pt loss to Villanova as a 16th seed does not boost the reputation of the League.

So? .500 teams don't belong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Audley

There are plenty of .500 (and worse) teams that made an appearance in Dayton.

Anyone disagree with my math?

Meanwhile, the tournament "winner" with its bid may suffer the humiliation of a playin game for the privilege of dancing with a #1 seed. My, we've come a long way with our tournament.

The hypocrisy is very hard to take---but if Miller of Arizona was willing to pay $100K for a player, that's because the bidding was at that level, not because he's trying to gain an unfair advantage.

But, we aren't ready for it until we are a 2 bid conference.

But why shouldn't the players and people who developed the players at significant cost not share in the huge pool of money being made from big time college athletics?

Make no mistake, I think college sports should be for student athletes. But we're kidding ourselves if we think that is happening at almost any level with the exception of the Ivies and Patriot League. And it isn't illegal for the players and AAU people to want some of that pot, nor is it immoral. It just violates NCAA rules written in another era.

For examples. this year Columbia may finish 6 and 8 in the league and 9-18 overall. They surely will be a #16 seed and might have a play-in game at the Big Dance. The argument by some of us would be that whatever little jolt that would come out of the IL Tournament would be quashed by getting crushed by Virginia/Villanova or whoever. Same holds true as to last year where it almost happened with Penn but at least Penn was 12-15 and a better team than this year's version - Columbia or Cornell. Who wants to watch their alma mater crushed??

The #1 spot also means we can hoist another Ivy Champs banner to the Palestra rafters, regardless of what happens in the conference tournament. That definitely means a lot to me, and I'll bet it means a lot to the players as well.

• Tiger69 Said:

I presume that you're on board with a tournament for the women, then?

http://www.ivyleague.com/news/2016/3/15/3_15_2 016_...

The second biggest issue is the timing. I don't love a smaller league having its tournament final on a Sunday. The committee will obviously deal with bigger leagues doing so, because it has to, but I feel like there could be a situation in the future where we are adversely impacted due to the difficulty the different scenarios the Ivies could raise, such that we'd pay for it with seeding (or even a two-bid scenario).

We’re still a little ways from this scenario, but suppose Penn and Harvard both win out to the Ivy final, and then Harvard wins. At that point, both teams are 14-2, and Harvard is 2-1 head to head with the second win at the Palestra. Who is the “rightful” champ then? Why is what happens over 14 games a better indicator than what happens over 16 with an extra game between the teams?

All I care about is a chance to play beyond the IL tourney. That tourney will be a true crapshoot.

So yes, the #1 position is very important--not so much for the tourney, but for knowing that at minimum they will be playing after that weekend no matter what.

• penn nation Said:

Last year, I would have been ecstatic to have been in the NIT. This year, however, it's going to be a serious disappointment. I suspect most of the rest of the Penn fans feel the same way.

Yeah, I’ve always found the anti-tourney folks to be more intellectually lazy than the pro-tourney side. That’s not to say all 14GT supporters are intellectually lazy, just that many refuse to engage with this argument as a set of tradeoffs rather than as a moral imperative that the 14GT always leads to the right outcome because the only right outcome is the outcome of the 14GT.

Some arguments from the anti-tourney side have held water over time:

- The Ivy League office would screw up the logistics from a fairness perspective
- The league isn’t good enough to get an at large right now
- It’ll take the focus away from a really exciting title race

But what all of those have in common is that they are probabilistic statements and one’s sentiment about the tourney should be set through how you weigh those odds moving forward, rather than your absolute belief that one side is “right.”

I believe there are non-trivial odds that a first-place team could have a late season injury that drastically changes its competitiveness in the NCAA tourney. I believe there are non-trivial odds that the timing of key injuries could change the quality of the opponents that each of the teams in the title chase play based on the schedule that make the SOS different from a true round robin. I believe there are non-trivial odds that in a sample size as small as 14, a significantly inferior team could win the regular season and the tourney could select for the better team.

For me, the upside from these odds outweigh the expect value of the negatives from a perfectly executed conference tourney. But our current iteration isn’t perfect executed, and is instead repeating the same error that dogged the America East for years (and kept some REALLY good teams out of the tourney at the expense of some 15s and 16s). I’m in the anti-tourney camp for now, but as the expected values change, I expect my stance to do so as well...

It means a lot to you and them because you both started in the days when the regular season championship was everything. Based on how other one-bid leagues behave, my suspicion is that as time goes by and memory fades, the regular-season championship will mean less and less.

My estimate of how likely it is that the league will get a second bid in any given year going forward is .... because I do not believe that the NCAA has any plans to be fair in this area--and there's been plenty of evidence the past few years to back me up on that.