The broken basketball system

The Canadian Interuniversity Sport Final 8 tournaments for men and women’s basketball are broken.

Not just a little broken either. It’ll take more than a band-aid solution to fix it. If you’re constructing a list of issues with the championship tournament, I really don’t know where you would start.  The seeding is blatantly flawed, a berth is gifted to the team that hosts and really, the best teams don’t make it.

In CIS hoop circles, the conversations when critiquing the tournament typically ends up in the same spots: is the tournament about getting the best eight teams in the country, or representing the country as equally as possible? Well, I’ve created a loose idea on how it can be both. I really don’t think that equal representation should matter, but I know that it always will. Allowing conferences to have one of eight spots despite their teams being perennially bad creates a boring product and useless games. Yes, Reseau du sport etudiant du Quebec, I’m looking at you and your 1-10 record in men’s Final 8 quarterfinal games over the past 11 years.

My suggestion is to expand the tournament back to 10 teams, but abolish the current caveats the CIS has on the seeding. The CIS had this format from 2004 to 2006, and it is unclear why they moved away from it. Attempts to contact the league and some outside historians of the tournament did not provide any help.

Some of the aforementioned stipulations for seeding are conference champions cannot be seeded lower than sixth and the host receives an automatic berth in the tournament. Both of these would be gone. We saw seeding issues this year, where McGill and Saint Mary’s were thoroughly pumped by lower-seeded teams. I can’t believe I have to say this, but when you put a floor for seeding four of the eight teams, you ruin the meaning of the seeds.

Under the revamped Final 10, a committee of CIS officials and coaches would determine the seeding for the following six teams: the OUA and Canada West finalists, RSEQ champion and AUS champion. The OUA and Canada West conferences are much larger and have performed better over the past handful of years, so giving them each two spots raises the talent level at the tournament. The last four teams would be wild card teams – the best of who did not get an automatic entry.

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Instead of using the criteria that the CIS currently uses, I want the wild card teams to be determined using Simple Ranking System. SRS is a formula that attempts to give a number value to teams based off their margin of victory and quality of opponents. Currently, the league tries to do this by giving the decision committee the ability to determine that a record may be better than the wins and losses show because of the quality of opponents. The logic with my idea is that the formula boils down the real record of a team into a number. SRS also weighs recent games more heavily, which means that teams that have rounded into form will have a better opportunity to make the playoffs. That equals better basketball teams in the tournament, which means better competition. Everyone wins.

A sidenote on current CIS criteria: should we place emphasis on a team’s whole season? The CIS likes to reward a “body of work,” but I’m sceptical. I want the best teams at the end of the year, not the team that was awesome in October pre-season action. And what about injuries or transfers who are eligible halfway through the season? If a team is absolutely hoopin’ in February, shouldn’t we want them in the tournament?

Those final four teams would be seeded in their own mini-bracket, where the team with the highest-ranked SRS team plays the lowest ranked. The winners of those games move on to the Final 8 bracket, and the team with the biggest margin of victory plays the No. 2 overall seed. If you were the loser of the play-in game, your nationals experience is over.

This idea makes the first games a little more interesting because even if it’s a blowout, you’ll see teams posturing for who they want to match-up with in the next game. What happens if they are throttling someone but want to play the No. 1 team instead of the No. 2? Madness ensues, probably.

From there, we roll with the normal Final 8 format and the fifth-place game gets reinstated.

I’ve pitched the idea around to some other followers of the league, and one rebuttal I’ve got is that the No. 1 and 2 teams have less time to prepare. With the size of coaching staffs, I think it’s fair to assume that it would not be a problem. Plus, those seeds get a team that has already played one game, giving them a fatigue factor.

The aim of all of this is to get the best teams in the tournament while representing all of the conferences. It would be great if there were nation-wide parity, but that really is a pipe dream.

Even if this format doesn’t satisfy some, I don’t think it’s a stretch to propose change. Throwing out ideas like this can get people talking. It’s time for the CIS to start listening, because what they have right now isn’t working.