For college basketball junkies March means March Madness. To many this is their favorite sporting event. The time where you can't wait to fill out your bracket and show everybody your knowledge, or lack thereof. The NCAA tournament brings people that will never talk about basketball to the water cooler at work asking "who's in your final four"? But Championship Week is actually more exciting to watch than the Big Dance.
Think about it. The NCAA tournament consists of 68 teams playing 67 games spread across three weekends. Championship Week (March 11-17) sees 16 conference tournaments go from start and finish within one week. 170 teams playing 154 games in ONE week. The sheer volume of games is impressive. Of the NCAA tournament, personally, the first weekend is my favorite. Multiple games on from noon until midnight excites me more than Final Four weekend. But that's nothing compared to what we get with the conference tournaments. Now I understand the quality of play is not always as good when watching leagues like the Big Sky and the SWAC but the most important games for these teams are in the conference tournaments. Their only hope to get some sort of national recognition is to get an automatic bid. Some teams will only be a 15 or 16 seed, or even worse end up in the play-in games. But that doesn't matter to them, just as long as they make it.
Not to mention, in conference tournaments you have one more chance against your rival to knock them out in a win or go home situation. It's rare that a team will play it's rival, or even another team from their conference in the NCAA tournament. Don't get me wrong, that's part of the beauty of it. But one more chance to watch Duke-North Carolina, Michigan-Michigan State, or Syracuse-Georgetown is always a good thing. Especially if you have yet to beat your rival in the regular season but you get them in a tournament. You can always say your team won when it mattered.
The biggest factor for me though is how much effort teams put into these games. Even in the major conferences more than half will only get into the NCAA tournament by getting the automatic bid that also comes with a conference tournament title. I feel this creates a sense of urgency with teams and can cause them to play better than we ever thought they could. Who can forget the run Gerry McNamara had with Syracuse in the 2006 Big East tournament. The Orange won four games in four days to capture the Big East title as McNamara hit game-winning three's and led the team to overtime wins and an NCAA birth the only way it could get one.
I look forward to March Madness every year. I fill out my bracket with great thought and effort, hoping I can out-pick friends and co-workers. I sit on the edge of my seat during every game with it by my side, hoping I don't have to tear it up before the first weekend is over. But as a fan of watching games, I'll take Championship Week and watch as many of the 170 games as I can in seven days.
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