March Madness: Rick Barnes’ statements may start a trend that humiliates the NCAA

It seems pretty obvious the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee doesn’t value conference tournaments anymore. The only way those can help you for March Madness is if you win them, securing an automatic berth that you otherwise wouldn’t have had.

Tennessee basketball proved that. The Vols entered the SEC Tournament in a cluster with the Auburn Tigers, Duke Blue Devils and Kentucky Wildcats. They won the SEC Championship, beating Kentucky to win the season series against them while having the same record, and finishing ahead of Duke and Auburn in every analytical ranking possible.

Somehow, though, they received a No. 3 seed while Duke, Auburn and Kentucky got No. 2 seeds. The Texas A&M Aggies, who had a Cinderella run to the SEC Tournament title game, didn’t even get a bid. Rick Barnes noticed the issue too, and he made the perfect suggestion in his Monday presser to humiliate the NCAA. Here’s what he said.

"“If conference tournaments don’t mean anything, if the teams are already slotted to be in the tournament can’t improve their seeding, we should stay at home and let the teams that are trying to get in the tournament fight for that (automatic) bid. Give our league a chance to get more (teams in the NCAA Tournament).”"

Yes, Barnes boldly suggested teams that have already secured bids for March Madness before tournament play should decide to sit the tournament out. Imagine, if a conference took that bold approach, how crazy this would be and how bad it would make the NCAA look.

Conference tournament week is a huge revenue booster for the leagues. There’s a reason they all have it now, even the Ivy League. It’s the perfect appetizer to March Madness. However, if you make the only relevance to it whether or not teams get an automatic bid and nothing else, you wreck its value.

That’s what the Selection Committee did this past year, and Power Five conferences with multiple teams making it shouldn’t let them get away with that. The NCAA is perfectly happy to enjoy the revenue that comes from these events.

Look, you don’t want to criticize this decision too harshly. In the past, the Selection Committee used to overvalue conference tournaments. It’s good that they want to place more emphasis on the regular season. That doesn’t mean you should ignore the event altogether, though.

Basically, it should be treated like extra regular season games except for the championship game, which of course has the say in who earns an automatic bid. Honestly, though, even that should change. The best case for expanding March Madness is to give automatic bids to every regular season and tournament champion.

If you did something like that, expanded the Big Dance to 80 teams and prioritized the 48 first-round byes by champions of both first, champions of just the regular season second and champions of just the conference tournaments third, you could create more intrigue behind the event and make the regular season better. It would be epic.

Instead, the Selection Committee chooses to render parts of the year useless. For Power Five teams, when you almost always know who is getting in before the conference tournament starts, there’s no suspense behind the event. When it comes to lesser conferences, the regular season means nothing.

Only the NCAA could get it wrong both ways. Barnes’ suggestion, of course, would cause them to overreact again and put everything on the conference tournament. However, at least it’s a way to humiliate them. They have no idea how to get March Madness right.