AWESOME: A College Hoops Conference Is Hosting A Regular Season Tournament This Week And We Need More Of This ASAP
Yeah, this is awesome. I don't care what you think, I think it's awesome. The Southland is having an AAU style Tournament to start the conference season. They drew names like a soccer event even.
Each team plays the same amount of games, winners advance, losers play losers. It's a great idea to try and get some interesting extra matchups. The Southland is a low-major conference, but I'd love to see this go on for bigger ones. Give me like C-USA so we can see WKU/Louisiana Tech again for a title on the line. I know the NBA has flirted with this idea, but in the college world it actually works. Knock it out in 3 days, a decent tune up for NCAA Tournament experience where you only have a day to prepare if you win the first game.
None of these teams have played a conference game yet either. That's why I love they are starting it this way. Draw up some interest, especially when this is the time of the year casual fans will start watching games. Even better some of these games will be on during the day. I always scream that we need more day time hoops. If we can get Tuesday night MACtion in football, surely we can get 2-3 day time games with 358 teams out there.
We actually used to get this with the ACC in a way. There was the Big Four Classic where the four Tobacco Road teams would play in Greensboro. Give me all of this sort of stuff just to break up the long season. Casual fans claim it's hard to get into college hoops regular season because the Tournament is what matters. So throw a couple bones of these sort of tournaments. I love it.