College Basketball Fairness and a Half Court Shot!

Welcome one and all!

I thought this week we could take a look at fairness in college basketball. Now as far as games are concerned I feel that the refs are doing an amazing job in most cases. What i'm talking about is national recognition for schools that are not in the BCS conferences. Now the BCS or Bowl Championship Series, is associated with college football but if you notice, the recognition that BCS schools recieve seems to carry over into basketball. It appears to me that schools in the WAC, MWC and other non BCS conferences have to fight tooht and nail to get any sort of recognition.

Now here is this weeks AP top 25 rankings:

1 Kansas
2 Villanova
3 Syracuse
4 Kentucky
5 Michigan State
6 West Virginia
7 Georgetown
8 Purdue
9 Texas
10 Duke
10 Kansas State
12 Brigham Young
13 Ohio State
14 Tennessee
15 New Mexico
16 Wisconsin
17 Gonzaga
18 Vanderbilt
19 Temple
20 Baylor
21 Georgia Tech
22 Pittsburgh
23 Butler
24 Northern Iowa
25 Mississippi

Now out of these top twentyfive teams eight of them are from non BCS conferences. Granted its not as lopsided as the polls are during football season but it still quite lopsided. This shows to me that the non BCS schools are still a long way off from gaining the national spotlight they deserve and I find it wrong that the schools football status is being carried over to basketball.

Schools like Villanova, Georgetown, Brigham Young, New Mexico, Gonzaga, Temple, Butler and Northern Iowa are doing great things to help the non BCS schools gain attention but these schools have to have to have great nonconference records and even better conference records to even get the selection committee to look their direction. For example with the WAC the team that wins the conference tournament will get in but that'll probably be it. The MWC might get a little luckier and get three, whereas the Big Ten, Big East and ACC had seven bids apiece in last years tournament. In 2009 each of the 31 conference winners got an automatic bid, this includes the 6 BCS conferences. That leaves 34 at large bids. Four of those bids went to non BCS conference schools, the remaining 30 went to BCS conference schools. So lets see.... 28 non BCS conferences get 32 bids and 6 BCS conferences get 36? that seems a little off. Now I don't want to take anything away from these student athletes. They are doing a tremendous job and are extremely talented individuals. I merely wanted to point out the signs that I was seeing of favortism for the BCS schools being carried over from football tho basketball. It just doesn't seem right to me but I hope these non BCS schools keep showing that they are a force to be reconed with and that all these athletes BCS and non BCS keep up the good work.

Now on to something else,
A girls basketball coach thought he was about to be on the recieving end of a joke when he was blindfolded and spun around at a pep rally and told he would win tickets to the NCAA's Final Four if he hit a half-court shot. The coach played along with the gag and sent the crowd into a frenzy by hitting the shot.

But no luck as far as the tickets go. The tickets were never actually purchased being as the whole bit was a gag, so they wound up buying him a gift card to a Mexican restaurant instead.

Response Time!

Thanks to everyone for thier comments last week. I appreciate hearing from everyone and now I would like to reply to Pat from Camarillo, Ca. Pat wrote:

"So you mean the Colts secondary can keep with the Saints receivers right?

And the Saints will win, but I suck at predicting score, so I won't even go there."


Pat,
I do believe that the Colts secondary will keep up. I don't think that they will shut them down completely but enough to come away victorious. I will stand by my belief that in order for the Saints to win they need a big showing from Bush. Good luck to both teams and Pat I hope to hear from you again.

Until next time,
Stu