The Hometown Bracket

Because neutral site postseason games are a disgrace

Hi there! I’m Preston Pack, host of The Wild Pitch, who you may know from previous collaborations like the Low Major Poll and the Daily Spin. I’ve always seen the NCAA tournament as a near-perfect postseason; there are very few changes I would make to it, and if I were actually in charge of tweaking it, I don’t think I’d do anything wild. But do you want to know the terrifying boring truth, or do you want to see me sock a few dingers completely overhaul the men’s basketball postseason for no good reason?

That’s what I thought. Let’s begin!

Here’s our tournament field! It’s a little bunched-up in places because Division I is concentrated so heavily in the eastern half of the United States, but almost every team is here.

There are only two changes to the real-life NCAA field. First, Merrimack, which is ineligible due to silly transition rules but won the NEC title, replaces conference runner-up Fairleigh Dickinson. For the purposes of this exercise, we’ll assume they would have fallen in the Knights’ location (i.e. last) on the NCAA seed list, since they finished with a near-identical record and KenPom rating. The other change is that the First Four at-large teams are removed from the field, both to consolidate to a mathematically-pleasing number of bids and because the First Four is a blight on the purity of the 64-team tournament.

You’ll notice that most of the map is grayed out, with sixteen teams in color. These are our sixteen regional hosts, but they’re not the same locations as in the real bracket. These are, instead, the top sixteen autobids to the tournament (following the official NCAA seed list), which places more emphasis on winning your conference tournament. We’ll call these teams Group A for future reference. This gives us sixteen regions to build the rest of the first round on:

• Tuscaloosa, Alabama (hosted by #1 Alabama)

• West Lafayette, Indiana (#4 Purdue)

• Austin, Texas (#6 Texas)

• Tucson, Arizona (#7 Arizona)

• Milwaukee, Wisconsin (#8 Marquette)

• Spokane, Washington (#10 Gonzaga)

• San Diego, California (#17 San Diego State)

• Durham, North Carolina (#18 Duke)

• Memphis, Tennessee (#29 Memphis)

• Boca Raton, Florida (#33 FAU)

• Charleston, South Carolina (#47 Charleston)

• Tulsa, Oklahoma (#48 Oral Roberts)

• Des Moines, Iowa (#49 Drake)

• Richmond, Virginia (#50 VCU)

• Kent, Ohio (#51 Kent State)

• New Rochelle, New York (#52 Iona)

The geographic nature of conferences (a phrase that’s going to age just brilliantly in a couple years when I do this with Big Ten champion UCLA) guarantees these host sites are spread out geographically. For a field with no less than seven teams in the state of Texas, having a regional there (and another in Oklahoma) is a clear improvement on the NCAA bracket, which arbitrarily sends them to locations like Des Moines, Denver, and Birmingham.

Even better, these sites reward conference tournament champions with packed home arenas for some of their biggest games of the season. How much sweeter would Texas’s 76-56 win over Kansas in the Big 12 final have been if it had guaranteed a first-round game in Moody Center? Or how about Arizona defeating UCLA in the Pac-12 title game, not just earning a regional of their own but forcing the Bruins to play away from home?

You could, of course, argue that some of these results would be different in a world where winning your conference tournament is so important. Maybe the Jayhawks would have put up more of a fight, knowing that more than a shift in which one seed they got was on the line. Nevertheless, we’ll work with the real-world results we have, which provide us with the sixteen hosts in Group A.

That leaves us 48 teams to split up. These we can break into three groups: the sixteen remaining autobids (Group B), the top sixteen at-larges (Group C), and the bottom sixteen at-larges (Group D). With each of these groups, we start with the highest seed in the NCAA’s list and work our way down, assigning each in turn to the closest regional host as the crow flies. For example, our top at-large is #2 Houston, which goes to nearby Austin, Texas; however, when we get a few spots down the list to #9 Baylor, Group C’s bid to Austin is occupied, so the Bears are instead sent up to Tulsa, Oklahoma.

After a lot of measurement, we’ve got ourselves sixteen full groups!

As you can see, the autobids in each region are ranked ahead of the at-larges, regardless of position in the true seed list. Most regions are pretty firmly geographic without being overcrowded by any particular conference, which is exactly what we want. There are also, as expected from this system, some potential tantalizing non-conference showdowns between historic rivals. Who wouldn’t want to see Kansas-Missouri, Virginia-Maryland, or Texas–Texas A&M in March?

But we won’t necessarily get all of those games. Despite the resemblance, this isn’t leading into a World Cup–style group stage. One of the key features of March Madness is that a single upset can knock out even the top contender at any point, and giving them multiple chances to prove themselves would ruin that aspect. Instead, each region will see a three-day single-ladder bracket to determine who it sends to the Sweet Sixteen. Here’s a look at the bracket we’d get for each regional:

Note that, thanks to the tight geographic nature of most of these regionals, we can hold games at home sites on consecutive dates. I’d personally include at least one rest day, but fifteen of these sixteen regionals would require less than a day on the road in total, and seven require less than ten hours. The only really rough one is going all the way from south Florida to Massachusetts and back in the Boca Raton regional; charter a couple of flights for that one. Everything else, though, is certainly no more difficult than some in-season travel turnarounds.

Some would argue that this favors conference champions too heavily, or even that teams would drop to inferior conferences to earn autobids and spots higher in the ladder. The latter objection seems unlikely because many power-conference teams that struggle to earn at-larges could easily join single-bid leagues right now but don’t. The former is more reasonable, but I’d counter by pointing out that conference tournament season is the best part of the college basketball season—even better, yes, than the actual NCAA tournament. The hectic scramble by at-large and autobid hopefuls to earn a spot in the dance is a dizzyingly brilliant two weeks of basketball.

The fact that a handful of P6 title games, usually involving teams locked into the bracket and often into their seed, have become formalities is a disappointment. Mid-majors have every reason in the world to battle desperately in pursuit of their conference title; why don’t some of the best teams in the sport? As mentioned above, games like Texas-Kansas and Arizona-UCLA become far more significant in this system, attaining the significance that games of this caliber should rightly have.

The rest of the tournament is more or less standard, proceeding to a sixteen-team single-elimination bracket that works much as the current Sweet Sixteen does. These games will, however, be hosted by the higher-ranked team in the seed list, right down to the national title game. Neutral sites delenda est.

And, well, that’s about it! I can’t imagine anything remotely similar to this will ever be implemented; even having home games in the NCAA tournament, which I feel would be an unobjectionably good change, is a pipe dream. But it’s fun to dream, isn’t it? After all, imagining the impossible—and, every so often, getting to see it actually happen—is what March is all about.