Yo! Wanna know who's gonna make the tourney? The Bronx Bomber plays the Swami, baby! Here's the rundown ...
I'm about to do something that I could get a lot of praise for. Something that can bring me accolades that surpass those of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes.
I'm going to tell you which teams are going to make the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament.
Wait a minute, you might say. You're not on that infamous committee which always seems to screw up every March, leaving anywhere from one to a bunch of teams out of the Big Dance.
But I have a quality that those committee members don't. I'm a college basketball fan.
I want to see the best teams there for the sake of watching a great 2 1/2 weeks of basketball. I have no economic interests or alumni interests clouding my decisions.
Not yet, at least.
But back to my task at hand. Here, my friends, are the 64 lucky teams:
We start with the 30 teams that receive automatic bids as a result of winning their postseason conference tournaments - or in the case of Princeton, Minnesota and UCLA, teams that get in automatically because their conferences don't have a postseason tournament.
The Big Sky, Big South, Big West, Big ... whatever. You know which ones I'm talking about. The conferences which have schools that you just have to laugh at. Tennessee-Martin of the Ohio Valley Conference, Northwestern State (northwest in what state, I don't know) of the Southland and Weber State of the Big Sky are a few that I happen to like.
But in any event, as I looked over the 30 conferences, I took the liberty (no, not the school in first place in the Big South Conference) of deciding that 10 of those conferences are just meaningless. They simply exist to fill up spots in the field and make teams with 18-12 records which don't make the tourney really angry.
Ultimately, maybe three or four of these teams will even make it out of the first round, proving that as a whole, this group of conferences has no business placing teams in the tournament.
So regardless of whether a team that went winless in the regular season wins its postseason tournament, the conference's regular-season champ still won't get an invitation in my book.
Seriously, if you put 20-5 South Alabama on the same court as 16-11 Virginia, you know that the ACC's Cavaliers will just flick off that Sun Belt powerhouse with their pinkies.
That leaves us with 44 spots left. Forty-four teams that actually are good and belong in a tournament strictly reserved for the nation's elite.
Knock 25 teams off that list of 44. Those are the teams in the top 25 poll at the end of the season. Heck, if you're one of the top 25 on one list, you gotta be in the top 64 of another which ranks on the same criteria.
The next 10 spots will be taken by teams which are champions of what I say are legitimate conferences - the ACC, Big Ten, SEC, WAC, Conference USA for example. Of course, will be quite a bit of overlapping with the top 25 in this group. But there will be a few cases where the current frontrunner won't win the postseason conference tournament.
Playing the law of averages, and knowing a bit about college basketball, we'll say that takes care of five more teams.
We're down to 14 and this is where the fan in me, and more important, the knowledgeable basketball critic, shines through. We have to decide which teams are the worst of the nation's best.
I'm penciling in schools like Providence, which has played second fiddle to Villanova in the Big East all season and has players both talented, like Austin Croshere, and those with great names, like God Shammgod.
Iowa gets my vote for the tourney. Andre Woolridge is the type of player that can put a team on his back an take it far into the tourney.
And besides, the Hawkeyes have played well since adjusting to the loss of Jess Settles, who's missed the whole season with an injury.
Fresno State gets in, not because it has more potential criminals than any team outside of the Nebraska football program, but because Jerry Tarkanian has proven that once March rolls around, he gets the most out of his players (as long as he doesn't play Duke).
Add a widely unknown small school like North Carolina-Charlotte, which plays in a beast of a league - Conference USA. It competes against the likes of Cincinnati, Louisville and Tulane and has managed a 9-3 mark within the league thus far.
Rounding out my field will be schools like Georgetown, Texas Tech, Purdue, California, Boston College, Texas, UNLV, Syracuse and Massachusetts.
These are all teams that have had either strong finishes, mammoth schedules or star players who have performed all season and can carry the load in the postseason.
Oh yeah, and the 64th and final team will be Michigan. Not because I'm hoping to spend a weekend in March in Tucson, Ariz. (one of the first-round sites in the West Region), but because Michigan is one of the 64 best teams in the country.
But when it receives a bid on March 9, Michigan will not have won a conference title and will not be ranked in the top 25.
That the Wolverines have to use the excuse of just being one of the 64 best teams, not one of the 10 or 15 best this season, is simply ridiculous.
Michigan will not have a strong finish, nor does it have a star player who has shown that he can carry the load in the postseason.
It has played a reasonably tough schedule.
And for this team, that's a shame.
- Alan Goldenbach can reached at agold@umich.edu.
MARK FRIEDMAN/Daily
The Wolverines should slide into the tournament - not exactly good news.