Kim Smith — one of my favorite Sacramento Monarchs and Canadian Olympic team members, though I never watched her play for Utah — is being inducted into the Pac-12 Hall of Honor, which might cause some eyes to roll among old Monarchs boosters. I was a season ticketholder at Arco Arena for three summers, and the nicest thing I heard about said about her was “I don’t hate Kim Smith right now”. On the other hand, I thought she was a tougher defender and rebounder than she got credit for, while her shooting might’ve been up to Olympics standard if the WNBA opposition weren’t so big.
For the first time this season, there are no ties among the Pac-12 standings, which makes prediction models easier to interpret, if not easier to trust.
I couldn’t plot a graph to assess the likely results of the championship tournament that didn’t either 1) over-estimate the probability of Stanford running away with it, or 2) under-estimate the likelihood of Arizona State beating — in order — UCLA, USC, Stanford, and Utah to steal the thing. In practice, Indiana and South Carolina would be hard-pressed to do that, but in theory, the Sun Devils have more than a zero chance.
There aren’t any tournament structures or playoff formats that are not flawed in some — usually truck-sized — fashion.
Undefeated college football teams were reaching bowl games with no chance of winning the national championship. Olympic teams in this sport or that were trying to throw matches early to improve their positions for winning gold later. The teams were sanctioned for that, but they weren’t to blame — it was the pairing and seeding structure that made that mess possible. High-level duplicate bridge tournaments also had that problem — which really got ugly when both teams were tanking to improve their chances to finish on top.
The only good thing to say about knockout formats is that you know they’ll finish “on time”, and they’re dramatic as hell — which is why the men’s NCAA tournament is enjoyable for office pool bettors who don’t care about sports for 50 weeks of a calendar year. Round-robin formats are much fairer (double round-robins better still), but take lots more time to complete.
Chess tournaments got it right in the 1930s. The 1938 AVRO tournament was a double round-robin with eight — four world champions — of the best players in the world. These days, chess tournaments are ridiculous, catering to dumbasses who think chess games conducted in seconds are most watchable. Even if today’s chess tournaments are played at reasonable time controls to start, the tiebreakers at the end are conducted at faster — and if still tied, faster still — time limits.
If it were up to me, I’d abolish conference tournaments, because they diminish the import of the ‘regular season’, and elevate the import of single games. Conference tournaments screw things up in two regards, but they’re lucrative — money changes everything, usually for the worse.
I’d dump the Pac-12 tournaments, and non-conference play, conduct a quadruple round-robin in which the leader gets the automatic NCAA bid, and leave the at-large bids to the selection committee circle jerks.
There’d be a lot less money coming in — no Las Vegas vacations for boosters traveling across the country to watch their teams play one and done — but there’d be much less doubt about which teams are first, second, and sixth among equals. (The preseason holiday tournaments would be out, too, but I can live with that.)
This is it. One weekend left to determine who’s getting one or two rounds off in the post-season tournament. You don’t think Utah feels fortunate that Colorado has to deal with Stanford first? There’s no getting around the vagaries of preseason schedule-making, but there’d be less to complain about if everyone played everyone else four times instead of two.