Oh yes. It’s time.
You might remember my stance that college hoops should crib from college football and get some sweet, sweet revenue going from television networks desperate for sports in a sports valley. I wrote about college basketball bowl season here and I regret nothing.
Now? Now it’s time to pick the fictional matchups and fictional cities for this season’s make-believe weekend of college basketball fun. A reminder!
The selection process? The top-80 in NCAA in win percentage based on a date 10 days before the games are scheduled. If there are ties, someone gets screwed; before you ask who, assume it works like everything else in the NCAA and it would be the mid-majors who bore the brunt of the screwing.
How would we best choose who goes where? Chance, obviously. I assigned each spot a number, 1-40 (MSG at 1, random place 40), then used a random number generator to choose which site would have right of first refusal to the matchups, which followed a 1 vs. 80, 2 vs. 79 format, altered ever-so-slightly when necessary to avoid conference overlaps and previous meetings during the season. As always, both because this will never happen and because entertainment is the currency by which we measure everything that matters here, tie goes to the vibes. Are they good? Then they are preferred.
There’s no point gilding the lily here. This event fills the void between the NFL Conference Championship games and the Super Bowl. To the games!