Author:
An Observer
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Date Posted: 11:25:05 03/12/26 Thu
If you were an omnipotent being and wanted to design a postseason tournament for an eight-team conference, there's no way that you'd pick an eight-team field. That completely devalues the regular season.
Choosing a smaller field not only maintains the importance of the regular season, it heightens the excitement of the last few weeks of the season. The top of the totem pole is jockeying for seeds and the title of course, but the real impact is on teams 3-7. These teams are out of the running for a championship by then, but are still locked in a real battle to make the field.
What happens in other conferences where the entire league is invited to their tournament? In the Big Ten, who cares if your team finishes 17th or 18th? It's not like there's a meaningful seeding advantage. You don't even get the first pick in next year's draft.
Our four-team field is so much better than an eight-team field, we should never take it for granted.
And yet, our structure was not designed for this beneficial effect on excitement and drama. It's pure serendipity.
The only reason we have postseason tournaments with smaller fields of four is that Bill Tierney suggested a men's lacrosse tournament to improve the RPI of Ivy teams before the NCAA field was selected. There was no point in having the bottom of the conference involved for this objective. Indeed, the weaker teams would hurt, not help, the RPI of the contenders.
So in 2010, Tierney proposed a tournament with only four participants and, here we are 16 years later, with the best conference tournaments in college sports.
We weren't smart. We got lucky. Thank you, Bill Tierney.
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