MBB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[markerickson]

The contributions include playing defense.

Let Stevie Ray get his points and guard the rest of the team and you will win.

Bowens on the third team?  I don't understand that selection or several others.

[knarocky22]

New regional rankings

Midwest Region
1. Augustana 20-5 19-5
2. Washington U. 19-5 16-4
3. Lawrence 20-2 18-2
4. Wheaton (Ill.) 19-6 15-6
5. Chicago 17-7 16-7
6. Elmhurst 18-7 17-7
7. Aurora 20-5 18-5
8. Webster 19-5 17-5

[LU_nut]

maybe someone over on this board can help me.

How is Augie ahead of Wash U.??   Wash U not only has a higher in region winning %, they have a much tougher opponents winning %.   I cannot figure out the logic in the rankings of the first three.   Why are all these numbers tracked if they are seemingly ignored?

Thanks

Signed

confused in Nutville

[Mr. Ypsi]

Nut, certainly at least part of the answer is Augie 66, WashU 60 (IN St. Louis).

[LU_nut]

Thank you Mr. Ypsi, that makes sense, especially given where the game was played.     then there is the issue of LU being above or behind both of them.....which gets back to the weighting of schedule difficulty vs. record.

I did bother to listen in to the podcast from the guy who heads the selection committee.......no warm and fuzzy there........mushy guidelines, mushy answers..........but a very firm commitment to Integrity.     I actually found some humor in it all.   

Thanks for the clarification.   I still view this all as too much of a Ouiche board(or however it was spelled).   I know there are financial concerns with all of this and classroom time, but I just think the athletes deserve something that is more D1 like.   heck, sometimes by trying to save a buck, they create a huge amount of class displacement.    These games mean just as much to the players as they do to players at any level.  In fact, I might argue they mean more......this is the highest level of non-paid b-ball in the country.   All higher levels get paid something.

Oh well, I better move on to fixing some other unfixable problem.   

[iwumichigander]

Nut, certainly at least part of the answer is Augie 66, WashU 60 (IN St. Louis).

Last 10 games Augustana 9-1; WashU 8-2 may have been a factor also

[Titan Q]

Nut, certainly at least part of the answer is Augie 66, WashU 60 (IN St. Louis).

Last 10 games Augustana 9-1; WashU 8-2 may have been a factor also

Record in last 10 games is not a criterion.

* In-region winning %
* Strength of schedule
* In-region head to head
* In-region common opponents
* Record vs regionally ranked teams

[Titan Q]

Yesterday during the annual post-season coaches conference call, the topic of the CCIW conference tournament came up and a vote was actually taken on continuing with it or not.  The vote was 4-4...would have taken 5-3 to get rid of the tournament.

The tournament was billed by a couple key proponents as a way to get more teams in the tournament.  As I have posted here numerous times, that logic is flawed.  Some years the tournament may help get more CCIW teams in, but I suspect more years than not it will actually hurt (assuming the host wins the tournament most years).  Look at the current situation heading into the 2008 CCIW tournament -- Augustana would be in as the Pool A team and I believe Wheaton has moved into position to have a solid chance at a Pool C.  This weekend, Wheaton will have to beat a team that has swept them and then beat Augustana on their floor to win the AQ.  If they lose either game, they've hurt their Pool C chances relative to their pre-tournament position.  (Wheaton's in-region winning% would drop with a 0-1 or 1-1 in Rock Island.)

Look at what happend in the WIAC.  I think most would agree that UW-Platteville and UW-Oshkosh had a Pool C chance before the conference tournament.  Both lost in Round 1 and now have no chance.

Why strong conferences, with multiple teams who have solid resumes after 25 games, want to have a conference tournament - where you are guaranteeing to add regional losses to some of your best teams - is still puzzling to me.

[Ralph Turner]

Titan, I think that the tourney is used as a motivational force by coaches whose teams have no chance of winning the championship.

Since hoops is a "tourney" sport, the #7 team winning the AQ (Coast Guard in 2007) is a dream that can be cited by coaches to keep the players doing more than going thru the motions.

In a four-team tourney, that may not work.  In the ASC this year, 6 of the 7 teams in the East were in contention for the four bids going into the last week as were five of eight teams in the ASC-West.  A 15-team, two-division conference is different from the CCIW.

It looks like the CCIW needs to hammer this thing out.

[sac]

I think most conferences consider a conference tournament as promoting access to the NCAA tournament.

[Titan Q]

Titan, I think that the tourney is used as a motivational force by coaches whose teams have no chance of winning the championship.

And I certainly agree that it has value along those lines and that it made the second half of the CCIW season much more exciting from a fan's standpoint.

But the conference tournament was billed as a way to get more teams in (I think the original CCIW press release on the topic even said that?), and I continue to feel like that is very misleading.  If the goal is to get as many teams in the tournament as possible, I don't think the CCIW should have a conference tournament...and I say that as a fan of a team whose only hope of making the NCAA tournament is by winning the CCIW tourny this weekend.

[robberki]

I used to be against the tourney, but I've changed my tune. I think it's a cool goal to shoot for and it generates excitement on the campuses of the school. I like it.

[Mr. Ypsi]

Like robberki, I opposed the tourney initially (and would definitely oppose an 8-team tourney), but I've come to like it, even though the stated rationale is baloney (I'm sure that in a 'power' conference, more teams are 'killed' by the extra loss than are gained by the tourney).

I like it because the season is still meaningful right to the end (an 8-team tourney would greatly reduce that, but with 4 teams almost everyone is still in contention to the final week), but there is little risk that a whole season will be superceded by a brief 'hot streak'.  (If #4 gets hot, they are still a 'worthy' team; not so much if #7 gets hot.)

Unlike simply sending the regular season champ, it gives a second chance to those teams that lost early due to injury, youth, or whatever (if they can't make the top 4 despite those issues, they were not worthy ENOUGH as a team to deserve another chance).

Besides, like Bob said, it is IWU's only chance this year!

[Gregory Sager]

I was never swayed by the conference's insistence that a tourney would aid in getting extra teams into the big dance; doing the math, I knew that some years it might help but a lot of years it would hurt instead. The reason why I didn't voice any objection to the CCIW adding a tourney was because it was deliberately approved in tandem with the NCAA's expansion of the D3 tourney to include more Pool C teams. I figured that any setbacks to a potential Pool C CCIW team caused by picking up an extra loss in the CCIW tourney would be offset by the fact that there were now more Pool C bids available, and that the CCIW could thus always count on one due to the fact that top-half CCIW teams always have strong regional records.

That hasn't worked out nearly as well as I had thought it would at the time, Elmhurst's omission last season being a crucial example. Let non-CCIWers think of me as arrogant or parochial for saying this, but I think that any D3 tourney field that only has one CCIW team is a D3 tourney field that has a hole in it. The same could be said of the WIAC and the NESCAC (and, over the past few seasons, of the UAA as well) -- not that our single round-robin friends in the northeastern corner of the country will ever have to go without a Pool C bid, of course. I realize that assembling the strongest possible field of 59 teams is not the top priority of the NCAA. In seasons when the CCIW only has one rep, such as it did last March, the league has nobody to blame but itself. Unfortunately, that blame has come to rest upon the decision to hold a postseason tourney, which has hurt the CCIW more than I initially thought it would.

[Titan Q]

Here is the original press release on the CCIW tournament...

http://www.cciw.org/winter_bball_m/cciwtournamentapproved.php

MEN'S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT APPROVED

ROCK ISLAND, Illinois – The College Conference of Illinois & Wisconsin will institute a conference tournament to determine its automatic qualifier in men's basketball for the NCAA Division III national tournament beginning with the 2005-06 season, it was announced today by conference commissioner Chris Martin. The tournament was approved on Monday, February 28 by a vote of the directors of athletics at the annual winter meetings, which were held in Wheaton, Illinois.

"Implementing the tournament is a significant step in the history of the CCIW," said Martin. "We hope that showcasing our top teams in the tournament will help us get a second, at-large bid, to the NCAA field each year. The tournament will be a very exciting event for our men's basketball programs."

The conference tournament will only determine the automatic qualifier for the national tournament as the conference champion will still come from the regular season round robin schedule. The format approved by the directors of athletics has the top four teams from the regular season meeting at the site of the regular season conference champion with the winner garnering the automatic qualifying spot. The last Friday and Saturday in February, which will be February 24-25 in 2006, will be the date for the tournament. Bracketing for the tournament will break down with the number two and three seeds meeting in the first game on Friday followed by the one and four seeds in the second game. The winners will meet on Saturday night.

This will be the first time the CCIW has ever used a tournament to determine its national qualifier although the women went to the system during the 2002-03 season.