Posted by hughesjr on 3/29/2011 8:25:00 AM (view original):
Why should it be as easy to win at Cleveland State as it is for Purdue?
Shouldn't it be easier to recruit from a Big 6 school than from a Mid Major?
Do we want the Div-1 game to be 324 teams where each team has the same chance to win / recruit ... or do we want it to model real life where the McDonalds All Americans congregate at teams like Kentucky, Duke, North Carolina, Kansas, Texas, etc.
I am just starting out in Div-1, but I do not expect my Dartmouth or IUPUI team to be able to recruit as well as Indiana or Syracuse. Do we really want that to be able to happen?
The question is not if Cleveland State should be beating UNC for an All-American. The question is can Cleveland State do ANYTHING to beat Wisconsin in the NCAAs?
But in real life, midmajor teams succeed at making runs into the Sweet Sixteen. This year, SDSU, BYU, VCU and Butler made the Sweet Sixteen from outside of a BCS conference. Last year, it was Northern Iowa, Butler, Xavier, Cornell and St. Mary's. (2009 was a chalk year in the tournament, with only Xavier and Gonzaga making it). 2008 had Davidson, Western Kentucky and Xavier. But a senior-laden midmajor team should be able to play with a power conference team, especially one that finished lower than third in their conference.
But when only the big boys are experiencing success, the problem is two fold. The first is that the tournament becomes much less exciting. If everybody knows that a decent Big 12 school -- not a conference champion or even a runner-up -- is going to cruise past a midmajor team, then the Cinderella aspect of the tournament is gone. Even in a sim, I want to see Ali Farokhmanesh nail a 3 to beat Kansas.
But the more important issue is that midmajor coaches end up trapped. If you do everything right as IUPUI coach -- you recruit high potential players who fit your system, make sure they have A/A+ knowledge of the offense and get them to be upperclassmen -- and you have no chance of any tournament success, you can't move up to coach the big boys. The coaches who want to be the next Brad Stevens are trapped in a cycle of first round defeats, which is no fun. And the coaches who want to be the next Bill Self and use Tulsa to get the Illinois job and then use Illinois to go to Kansas aren't able to move up because, paradoxically, they haven't had the kind of post-season success necessary to get the Illinois job.
It used to be that a team of maxed-out midmajor D1 recruits -- as upperclassmen -- could give major teams a real run for their money. But with the new recruit generation, those players simply can't compete against the big boys. The McD's All-Americans are still really, really good. But you can't find any Matt Howards anymore.