Poor Man's Commish » rules/regulations

How to do a 96-team tourney the right way (88: better, 112: do-able)

poormanscommish — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 19:15:46 +0000

96 teams, 32 per regional (click)

As someone who runs tournaments and mints brackets for a living, here’s how I would’ve structured the new 96-team format that the NCAA just announced. First of all, since I’m an NBA guy, I’m all for the expansion because it allows NBA’ers to better evaluate draft prospects under one roof – but that’s for another blogpost.

NCAA vice president Greg Shaheen yesterday suggested the following changes to the existing 65-team format…

Eliminate the 65th- vs 64th-seeded play-in game, which was originally played on Tuesday, two days after the last conference tournament championships on Sunday.
The top eight seeds in each of the four regionals get a first-round bye. Therefore, there are sixteen teams competing for the bottom eight spots in each regional. It follows that there will now be 24 teams in each regional. 24 x 4 = 96.
The new play-in games amongst the #9 thru #24 seeds will occur on Thursday and Friday, effectively pushing everything back one round, which leaves an extra two days of games to reach the Sweet Sixteen (one day for half the field). This extra round causes an overflow to be held the Tuesday and Wednesday immediately following the first weekend. That means the Sweet Sixteen will still continue as normally scheduled, still occurring on the following Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. There is controversy surrounding the fact that a team that happens to traverse the bracket will have to miss almost an entire week’s worth of classes.

The issue I have is that, if you click on this NCAA-proposed 24-team regional bracket above (remember, there’s four of these regional brackets!), it becomes incredibly confusing for fans, completely altering the established fun of bracket-filling. Yep, now you have to fill out an additional thirty-two bracket pairings than before, or eight more bracket pairings per regional (8 x 4 = 32)! And the strategy does not do that much to eliminate the blowouts that we so often see amongst the #1 vs #16 and #2 vs #15 matchups.

IMPROVE, NOT INTRUDE

In the following descriptions, I’m going to loosely use the terms “NIT” and “play-in”, so that it’s a bit easier to follow. My idea centers around the notion that the NIT is the play-in for the NCAA, but officially the whole thing would be called the NCAAs and they’d probably eliminate the “NIT” moniker.

There is a better way that is less confusing and does a better job of eliminating the throw-away low-seeded blowouts. I’d actually even go further to say that an 88-team format is the absolute best, but I can understand the NCAA not wanting to eliminate 9 teams. 65 in the NCAA plus 32 in the NIT, in the present system, minus my 88-team suggestion means there would be 9 fewer teams in the NCAA+NIT. That’d be 9 more teams for the upstart/obscure CBI and CIT tournaments – not a good competitive business move by the NCAA on that front.

If it were up to me, the NIT would become the play-in for the last few seeds in the NCAA. After all, in the present system the NIT already starts on the Tuesday after conference tournament championship weekend. The underlying assumption for doing this is that East Tennessee State probably would have still lost to Dayton or UNC, the NIT finalists, and that most casual observers would rather see Kentucky play against a more recognizable name, such as a Dayton or a UNC, in the first round of a 64-team field, not an obscure team that happened to win a conference tournament for the automatic bid. In short, you’d get less of a fan revolt by explaining that you’re merely attaching the NIT field to the existing NCAA bracket, effectively letting at-large teams go to war over just the last 2 seeds per regional.

BEST ALTERNATIVE: 88 TEAMS

To the casual observer, the notion of the NIT champion being the 66th-best team this season would still hold. With my 88-team system, it’s less of intrusion into the 64-team field and more of an improvement of the bottom feeders. We’re not really rocking your world all that much, is what the NCAA should or would say.

88 teams, 22 per regional (click)

So you start with 32 NIT-ish teams on Tuesday at the same 16 venues that make up the current 64-team field (4 teams per venue in the first round). By Wednesday morning, you’re left with 16 teams. On Wednesday night, the 16 teams play again to whittle the field down to 8.

The remaining 8 NIT-ish teams are given the #15 and #16 seeds in each of the four regionals. For example, it’d be #16 UNC vs #1 Kentucky and #16 Dayton vs #1 Duke. There’d be a much, much better chance of a #16 overthrowing a #1 than before. And a #2 beating a #15 would be far more likely than it is today. Quite simply, there would be fewer thirty-point blowouts in the #1 and #2 first-round games. From an NBA perspective, those are currently throw-away games because you can’t really continue to evaluate John Wall in a blowout. And does anybody still tune into those #1 vs #16 games?

Besides, an 88-team field certainly has a lot more marketing potential than 96. Eighty-eight is just a more aesthetically pleasing number than ninety-six.

96 TEAMS, IF YOU MUST

Alright, well let’s assume that the NCAA absolutely cannot let go of 96 teams, instead of my proposed 88. I just think that they haven’t thought about the mathematics of bracketing when they simply add the NIT’s 32 to the NCAA’s 64 (okay, 65) to get to 96. It’s so back-of-the-napkin right now. If you have 88, then you’re letting 8 teams go to the competition (CBI, CIT). I can understand the business decision, but I still think the elegance of the number “88″ and the fact that you are effectively making the #1 vs #16 and #2 vs #15 games more competitive outweighs the loss of 8 (okay, 9) teams, but that’s just me.

So then let’s expand my 88-team format to 96. It’s clunky, but it’s do-able. You end up with 44 NIT teams vying for the #16, #15, and #14 spots, instead of just the #16 and #15 seeds in the 88-team format. With 3 NCAA bottom seeds per regional up for grabs, that means you have 13 seeds locked and loaded. 13 x 4 = 52 and 96 – 52 = 44. That’s how we arrive at 44 NIT-ish teams.

With 44 NIT teams, that’s 11 per region. Here’s where it gets clunky because eleven is not a “nice” tournament number to work with. Again, you’re vying for the #14, #15, and #16 seeds in each region. As a bracket-maker and someone who determines the seeds, you have to assume that you were fair in your seeding and that all the top seeds will advance. Of course, it never ends up that way, but at least you covered your bases and did your best in fair seeding.

That being said, you must assume the #1 NIT seed in that regional will survive and be the best team from that field. It follows that with 11 NIT teams per regional, the assumed #1 team should have earned the right to play the assumed lowest-seeded team, the #2 against the next-lowest, and so on and so forth.

96-team bracket, bottom 3 seeds play-in per regional

That results in a first-round NIT bye for the #1 NIT seed in each regional. Again, the sanctity of the top 64 slots is maintained, only altered with an appendage that determines the bottom 3 seeds in each regional, or the bottom 12 seeds overall. That means 52 seeds are as good as they’ve always been.

The play-in brackets are somewhat imbalanced if you look at the graphic (click on the image), which creates some scheduling difficulties down the line. All the first-round play-in games obviously will start again on Tuesday immediately following conference tournament Sunday championships. But when we get done with the play-ins, we’ll have three spots, not just two, which causes problems with the Thursday-Saturday and Friday-Sunday setups. I don’t have a solution for this at the moment, but an easy out would be just to extend to Monday and, if need be, Tuesday at the same venue.

By the next round, things go back to normal (Sweet Sixteen on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday of the following week). However, this is a Tuesday-to-Tuesday-then-Thursday scenario and casts a slightly wider net than the NCAA’s Thursday-Tuesday-Thursday strategy. Again, I’m sure there’s a way to get the clunky 11-team play-in bracket done by Monday or even Sunday, if they put their minds to it.

This also appeases the fans. They can, like in years past, ignore the NIT-ish play-in games and just concentrate on the remaining 64 teams, which was the same bracket on that Thursday, as before.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, 112 TEAMS IS DO-ABLE

Now, let’s say the NCAA wants this whole endeavor to end up with a knockout punch of its competition, the CBI and CIT. Well, due to the format of the brackets, this is very do-able if they expand to 112 teams. I kid you not. It’s certainly much easier logistically than 96 teams, as you’ll soon find out.

In a 112-team field, we are now on a mission to replace the last 4 seeds in each regional — #13, #14, #15, and #16 — by putting those spots up for grabs with teams that would’ve been relegated to the NIT, CBI, and CIT in years past. When you lock and load the top 12 teams in each regional, that means you have 48 teams out of the original 64 field already sealed.

You could then have four more teams vie for each of the four bottom spots in each regional, or 16 teams in a play-in. 16 + 12 = 28 teams per regional, which is 112 teams for four regionals. It’s a rather straightforward and elegant solution. Each of the four bottom seeds, #13 thru #16, is determined by a mini-final-four bracket that whittles 4 teams down to 1, for each of those spots. On Tuesday, you have the four teams play two games. On Thursday, the winners play each other. By Thursday late night and even staying in the same venue (this year there were 16 venues, 4 teams or 2 games per venue, in the field of 64), you’ll have your #13, #14, #15, and #16 seeds determined.

112-team bracket, bottom 4 seeds play-in

Then on Saturday, that #16 seed plays the #1 seed. To reach the Sweet Sixteen, we need to extend the regional out until Monday. This is a Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday-Monday strategy, all at one venue. It follows that the other side of the regional, for logistics and TV purposes, can go with Wednesday-Friday-Sunday-Tuesday.

That doesn’t leave a whole lot of wiggle room for the concern over athletes being out of class, but if you think about it, if a low seed actually makes it through that whole week beginning on Tuesday, with the Sweet Sixteen looming as early as Thursday after that (two days of rest, in that you might as well head straight to the next venue without flying back home), it’s probably a once-in-a-lifetime Northern Iowa type of experience. The mid-major will take it.

On the other side of the coin, if you’re a #1 seed, you don’t play until Saturday, then probably Monday barring an upset. If you’re a high-seeded team, you actually stay in school longer that first week!

WHY FOCUSING ON PLAY-INS IS THE KEY

Basketball is basketball. Not only in all of my leagues and tournaments, but in leagues all over the world and at all levels, you have elite teams, very good teams, and the middle of the pack. You also have the cellar dwellers, but those are already weeded out here in the NCAA Tournament. It’s a standard bell curve. The difficulty is figuring out the middle-of-the-pack teams. And with the NIT and low-seeded NCAA field as we know them today, we are talking about the middle of the pack.

By focusing on just (replacing) the bottom seeds of the traditional 64-team format, you’re simply letting nature take its course. Better, you’re eliminating a difficult task of the Tournament Committee. You’re admitting that seeds #13 thru #16 might as well be determined by actual competition. And you’re not just cutting off regular season champions who happen to lose their conference tourneys.

The evidence is already there. #13 and lower seeds upsetting #4 and higher seeds just does not happen all that much. Worse, they are blowouts, more often than not.

I really like the expansion approach because of this bell curve, but I think the NCAA’s proposed solution is flawed and will only draw the ire of fans who can’t fathom how they’ll fill out their brackets now. And isn’t that the life-blood of this whole thing? That’s why the ratings are so high. The casual fan knows that a #5 seed is going to fall, so that’s why they tune in.

In my rec leagues, I’ve done 22-team quasi-double-elimination playoff formats in the past, so when analyzing a one-and-done bracket, that stuff is a piece of cake. Here’s an example of a 13-team quasi-double-elimination bracket that I did earlier this year (click to expand)…

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Obscure rules: the flagrant 2-for-1

poormanscommish — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:43:10 +0000

Flagrant foul committed on Dwight Howard.

Here at Dream League, we have so many games each and every week, eventually we’ll see even the most obscure calls per the rules of the NBA.

Remember when there was no such thing as an “and-one” and in the NBA, if you got fouled on a made basket, you got to shoot two to make one?

Yeah, me neither. But even something as ancient as “two-to-make-one” is still possible in today’s game!

In the NBA, if there’s a flagrant foul, you get two free throw shots and the ball. You know that already. But what if there’s a flagrant foul, and you actually made the shot? What then? Two shots and the ball still?

No, you get two shots to make the “and-one” free throw. That’s when the two-to-make-one returns from the grave!You might also like:

Perpetrators in dreamleague? Never! ;-)

poormanscommish — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:50:44 +0000

Funny post appeared in TrueHoop today: Sneaking a suspended player on the court in a teammate’s uniform. If you’re too lazy to click, it starts with a Turkish player in his country’s top pro league. He gets suspended for fighting. While he’s serving the suspension, in an upcoming game he and his coach conspire to have him put a subpar teammate’s jersey on and sneak into a game! I’ll let TrueHoop top it off…

he was only detected…after a rival team noticed suspiciously good statistics for Tufan Ersöz, the player whose jersey [Cemal Nalga] was wearing

Sneaking players in dreamleague? Never!

I said this was funny, but at the same time, it brings up some serious issues concerning fair play.

To the other Poor Man’s Commishes out there, I guarantee you this will happen in your league, if it hasn’t happened already.

I hate to admit it, but every season in our dreamleague rec leagues, this also happens. Once again, we have evidence that what happens in the pros, happens in dreamleague!

In Dream League’s Bay Area league, we have over 125 teams spread across at least ten separate divisions. Often times, participants choose to play on two teams in separate divisions, something which we can manage, although everyone realizes the risks when we start our trademark double-elimination playoffs, which can mean a doubleheader for any team that loses and gets bumped down to the Losers Bracket of their division (think about it, a doubleheader for 2 teams can equal 4 games in one day for one guy!).

Anyhoo, playing for two teams in separate, disparate competitive divisions is no problem. But guys will still play on another team from the same division!

The main reason for doing it is because your team doesn’t have enough players to field a squad, and would rather not forfeit, even though our rulebook states that you can grab any random dude off the street to fill a spot (as long as it’s still the regular season and you don’t have more than three players who would be of a caliber in a higher division).

But sometimes, guys just want to win, and they’ll cheat to do it.

And every time they do it, they perpetrate as an impostor. The guy who is playing on the other team in the same division will have his name written as someone else’s on the scoresheet.

Usually, this happens in our lower divisions because in the higher divisions, everybody pretty much knows each other after a couple seasons (kinda like the close-knit player community in the NBA), and you really can’t get away with it. But in the lower divisions where we have more turnover of teams, people can get away with it.

As a Poor Man’s Commish, perpetrating is very hard to police, but we’ve gotten to a point where all my scorekeepers know who’s on what team, and any new players playing on more than one team in the same division would stick out like a sore thumb.

Which means the only time people get away with this is when the player is a non-factor. But if he played a good game and the other team has a sneaking suspicion that they’ve seen this really good player on another team that they played earlier in the season, then all hell breaks loose.

Which means this is just such a stupid thing to do, even though your first inclination is to categorize it as a “white lie”. You can get away with it, but you don’t realize how easy it is to get caught! And when you get caught, it’s bad. We actually have a rule in the Bay Area league now where if this happens, it’s an automatic forfeit and a $25 fine to the team.

Matter of fact, this happened last Sunday! I know that the “crimes” committed are usually out of competitive desperation, but the problem with it is, you leave your opponent in a precarious situation. It makes everything uncomfortable and, quite frankly, wastes the Poor Man’s Commish’s time in trying to get all the facts and make everybody happy.

My solution for last Sunday is to fine the team that knowingly picked up the illegal player $25. That team still lost their game, so issuing a forfeit changes nothing in this case, but I would’ve reversed the win/loss, had they won.

Moreover, the second team must also bear responsibility for having this player as well, because their opponent was the one that claimed they were given a raw deal having to play against a good player who played for another team already. So it ended up that the second team beat the opponent that protested. On top of that, the second team had no idea that the player had illegally played for the first team.

Because the perpetrating player was supposed to be on the second team anyways, I’m not going to issue a forfeit on the second team in their win against the team that protested. However, we do have $5 fines for egregious unsportsmanlike technical fouls and what the player did was equivalent to two technicals.

Therefore, I have given the second team the choice of accepting a $10 fine, equivalent to a double-technical, and letting that player continue playing with them — the team that he’s supposed to be on — or accepting a one-game suspension for that player.

Again, the first team (the perpetrator) got fined $25 and would’ve received an automatic forfeit had they not still lost.You might also like:

I believe in 0.3

poormanscommish — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:57:40 +0000

Brad Miller's shot with 0.3 did not get off in time.

Last night NBA referees negated Brad Miller’s potential buzzer-beating win in the Chicago Bulls’ one-point loss to the Denver Nuggets. You can see in the paused replay above that, in fact, he did not get the shot off in time when the clock showed zeros.

Here’s a rare situation where if it can happen in the NBA, it can never happen in Dream League. In Dream League, Brad Miller’s shot counts and everybody puts it in the Top Ten coolest basketball things they’ve ever participated in. We would’ve never known that the shot really shouldn’t have counted. This brings me back to a similar play in Dream League’s Open League many years ago when the NBA’s 0.3-second rule was first introduced.

I’m pretty sure it was Kato Pierce who made the game-winning shot with 0.3 left in our Dream League game. We were over at Potrero Hill Rec Center and Kato’s team was down by 1. The scoreboard at Potrero doesn’t show tenths of a second, but at the time, the scoreboard control panel was still capable of showing it (the box has since undergone various repairs, so who knows if it still displays as it did before).

So when the ball went out of bounds baseline and the game clock showed zeros although the buzzer hadn’t sounded, with me working the table, I told everyone that there were 0.3 seconds per the scoreboard panel display.

Kato’s team drew up a smart play. Basically they had the ball out of bounds baseline under the basket, to the left if you are facing the basket. It’s all kind of a blur, but the play had Kato somehow get open on the opposite baseline area, and he drained a fifteen-foot jumper to win the game.

That’s when I became convinced that the 0.3 rule was the correct rule.

There’s some debate by Henry Abbott on TrueHoop that it takes the same 0.3 seconds for a human being to react to a play, but let me tell you how you’re supposed to operate the scoreboard in this instance. Now, the official rule is that the clock starts once someone on the court (inbounds, of course) touches the ball after being inbounded. But as the scoreboard operator with only 0.3 left on the clock, you can’t wait for a player to touch it, then start the clock. You have to anticipate it. You watch the play, you watch the flight of the ball, and you time it to start right when the recipient of the pass gets the ball. I don’t think there’s any other way, literally on Earth, to do it.

This method is certainly prone to mistakes. The most common error is when a defender deflects the ball. If this happens, I can assure you that you will be at least 0.3 seconds off because, not only as Abbott’s “experts” purport, but also from personal experience, it takes at least that much time for you to react to the deflection.

Someday there will be a controversial play in the NBA in which there’s, let’s say, 0.4 seconds left, someone inbounds it, a defender deflects it (just a slight tip!), the clock does not start right at that moment because that is humanly impossible, and the inbounder’s teammate drains a shot before the red lights on the backboard flash.

Replay wouldn’t necessarily solve the problem because the clock wouldn’t have started until about 0.3 seconds after the deflection. So then the refs would have multiple issues to deal with in making their on-court decision in front of thousands of onlookers. Even if they take that into account, then you’ve got to mathematically estimate if the player still got the shot off in time, an impossible task for a ref. Therefore, the refs would then revert to the video (which is inaccurate in the first place because, again, the clock didn’t start on time) and they would declare the shot good when, in fact, there’s a chance that the shot really didn’t get off in time. The losing team would then file a protest and then-Commissioner Adam Silver would be faced with a difficult decision.

Yet a third error that could occur, assuming the scoreboard operator anticipates the reception of the ball inbounded, is on a free throw. The ball clangs off the rim and is essentially up for grabs. Maybe two players accidentally bump each other trying to reach for the ball and end up not touching it. The scoreboard operator actually starts the clock too early in this example.

I’ve done this before. In fact, it was another Open League game many years ago when Maurice Brown was at the line with less than 1 second remaining, probably somewhere between 0.6 and 0.9 seconds, down by two points. So everyone in the gym knew he was going to miss on purpose, which he did, but in anticipation of the miss, I accidentally started the clock right when the ball hit the rim! Good intentions, very bad result. So the buzzer sounded maybe 0.1 or 0.2 seconds after hitting the rim, everyone knew it shouldn’t have sounded until after when it did, but no one on Brown’s team rebounded it for a putback. Everyone played through the gaffe as if there were no buzzer, so that’s how we decided it. Had someone on Brown’s team rebounded it and made a putback, we probably would’ve counted it. From that day forward, I vowed never to screw up a free throw clock start with only a few ticks left on the clock.

Which brings us back to last night in Chicago. Remember, Miller had 0.3 seconds to shoot the ball only because, in the previous play, Chauncey Billups purposely missed a free throw with 0.6 seconds left. Incidentally, it could even be debated that the play before that ought to be analyzed to see if Billups actually got fouled with 0.6 remaining.

In any case, if you look at the replay of the free throw rebound, first of all you’ll see that the initial scoreboard operation had time expiring. In the scrum for the rebound, it’s really hard to tell when you should stop the clock. In fact, if you look at the replay, with 0.3 seconds left, the rebounder (I think it was Joakim Noah) is still in the air coming down from his jump! That suggests that there should have been less than 0.3 seconds remaining on the next play.

However, I’m in favor of the refs merely subtracting 0.3 seconds from 0.6 to give Chicago the timeout and the ensuing inbounds in the frontcourt. I don’t think a player necessarily has to land before he gets the timeout granted.

All in all, after closely analyzing the highlights and hitting the mouse button on my computer to pause and frame-by-frame advance the video as carefully as I could, I believe the clock was started and stopped, on those two plays (the Billups free throw and Miller’s shot), with near perfection. And by the way, it has been confirmed to me by not only the Warriors scoreboard operator, but also our NBA replacement refs, that in “crunch time” it’s actually one of the referees who starts the clock using a remote control device attached to their waist!

So in conclusion, since Dream League does not have instant replay, in Dream League Brad Miller’s shot counts and the Chicago Bulls win. I’m no longer convinced that Kato really got his 0.3-seconds-left shot in time years ago, either.

Not to mention, it’s very difficult to remind all Dream League refs that 0.3 is, indeed, the rule. Even for free throw rebounds, to automatically subtract that 0.3. Even though I tell my crews to text me on the spot if something weird, urgent, or game-changing comes up, often times they simply don’t. They either just decide that they can handle the situation themselves or they forget I’m available as a resource even if I’m not there.

Interestingly, the 0.3 rule kind of took away some excitement from the Chicago-Denver game, whereas in Dream League, the result would’ve been, oh, more “down to earth”. But I’m still a believer in 0.3 because it’s the right play. That’s why I’m a stickler for tenths-of-a-second on any of Dream League’s gym’s scoreboards. It’s a huge pet peeve of mine.

I also think that having the tenths-of-a-second display adds drama and excitement. Just seeing that hurried, fast-moving, unreadable-until-it-stops digit in the waning, crucial moments of your game, that automatically raises your blood pressure!

So to answer Abbott (as I often do, in disagreement!), if you’re going to have tenths-of-a-second on your clock, then you better go the whole nine yards with it.

Also, I would recommend that the NBA review all play starts and stops, in the fourth quarter and overtimes, of plays with 0.9 seconds remaining or less and the game within reach of one possession of either team. This means Billups’s foul should have been reviewed as far as the clock is concerned. We’re only talking ten to twenty advances of the video frame and in, quite frankly, very rare circumstances.You might also like: