Regular Seasoning

By: Eli Kaberon

A college football season just ended, with two different prevalent trains of thought regarding who should be crowned national champion. Some would make a case that LSU, the team that won the official BCS title, is the best team because their performance over the course of the season. The Tigers were 7-1 against teams in the Top 20 of the AP Poll, won the nation’s most difficult conference - the SEC - and walloped Ohio State 38-24 in the final game of the season. Yet they lost their regular season finale to Arkansas, a huge argument against them.Another position is that either USC or Georgia should be considered the best in the land, because of how each finished the season. Both the Trojans and Bulldogs finished the year on long win streaks, with USC taking their final five contests and Georgia finishing the year with seven consecutive victories. If college football had a playoff, this argument goes, LSU wouldn’t have been able to knock off either of these two schools the way they were playing when the season ended. The problem with that is, both teams have a strike against them: Georgia failed to win its own division of the SEC and USC lost at home to a bad Stanford team.

So the debate comes down to what’s more important: A team’s strength and consistency throughout the entire length of the season or just how they finish? Thankfully, in college basketball, both of these elements are key to a squad’s success. To cut down the nets at the end of the year, a team must have some great accomplishments during the regular season, but also get hot down the stretch. Mess up either one, and it’s over for you.

There are some fans of March Madness that don’t watch much hoops action during the regular season. They say it is pointless, since so many teams make the NCAA tournament, and because the gap between the elite teams and the average teams in college basketball is so wide. Others say that because every conference - excepting the old fashioned Ivy League - has a conference tournament, the records from November through February don’t even matter. And then there’s the thinking that the only two regular season college basketball games that matter are the two times Duke and North Carolina square off. These fans like the one-loss-and-done aspect of college football’s regular season (though LSU tossed a monkey wrench in that theory) and the basketball tournament.

The problem with this thinking is that it simply isn’t true. Despite the differences in how they determine a champion, the games played in the regular season are important in both college basketball as well as football. The 25 or so contests that each school plays before March help their position in the tournament, both in terms of seed and location. Regular season action also prepares a team for the postseason schedule and the different styles of play they may see. And, of course, the regular season games give fans a better chance to understand a squad’s strengths and weaknesses - which helps us fill out our tournament brackets in March. One loss may not end a season, but it can play a huge role in a school’s overall success.

Because college basketball actually has a post-season that crowns the best team on the court - as opposed to the best teams in the polls - the regular season is used to organize and evaluate who the best teams are. This translates to the seeding for the tournament, as well as the location of the games played. For example if the University of North Carolina - who was the number one team until their loss to Maryland - continues to do well in the regular season, they might never have to leave their home state to go to the Final Four. With first- and second-round games scheduled to be played in Raleigh, and regional semifinal and final games set for Charlotte, the Tar Heels could be given a number one seed and a tremendous reward for their regular season success.

Another importance of the regular season is preparation for the tournament. In a normal football schedule, a team plays every Saturday during the regular season followed by a month or longer layoff before their bowl game. This often leads to extreme rust, with players so used to a normal routine and then having everything shift around. (See the last two BCS title games for proof.)

But in basketball, a coach can prepare his players for the schedule and layout of the post-season. The NCAA tournament schedule - playing a game on either Thursday or Friday with the winner advancing to play a game either Saturday or Sunday - is easily duplicated in the regular season by playing two games in three nights. This schedule is not easy for any team, but the mental and physical grind it takes is worth it in terms of experience. Because come March, no team wants to be put in an unfamiliar situation.

Along those same lines, no team wants to be matched up against an opponent in the tournament that runs a style of offense or defense that is different or unusual. Going all season against teams that play simple man-to-man D won’t be much help to a school if in the first round of the NCAA’s they are matched up with a squad like Syracuse, and their famous 2-3 zone defense. Same goes for a squad used to guarding a motion offense when they are matched up against North Carolina’s secondary fast break attack. Coaches prepare for the unknown of March by facing all different varieties of teams in non-conference play, a luxury that college football teams do not have.

A great example of this was last March, when USC faced off against Texas in the second round of the tournament. Most people thought the Longhorns would win easily, because they had the National Player of the Year in freshman forward Kevin Durant and it was assumed there was nobody out there, or at least not a five seed like USC, who could stop him. But the Trojans knew how to handle a guy like Durant. Earlier in the season they had faced - and lost to - the University of Kansas, a squad with tremendous depth that featured a lot of skilled players. The Trojans figured out after that game that team play is much tougher to stop than just one guy. So they let Durant get his stats - he finished the game with 30 points and nine rebounds - and limited everybody else on the Longhorns roster. The other Texas players shot a combined 13 for 40 (33%) and USC won easily, 87-68.

That game didn’t help my bracket, considering I had the Longhorns penciled in all the way to the elite eight last March, but my picks were helped plenty by watching a great deal of regular season action. Following the sport all winter informs a fan on who the best players and teams are, what trends are taking place in the sport, and why certain teams do or don’t match up well with others. For example, if Georgetown was set to play Massachusetts in the NCAA tournament this upcoming March, my guess is that most folks would take the Hoyas. GU has been a top-ten team all season, they have tremendous depth, and were in the Final Four just last year. But if you’ve been paying attention, you’d know they have trouble against teams that get to the free throw line.

In G-Town’s two losses, at Memphis and at Pittsburgh, their opponents made a combined 39 free throws, 16 more than the Hoyas did in those two game. In a third game, a three-point win at home over UConn, the Huskies scored 18 points at the charity stripe, again more than Georgetown did. Massachusetts is seventh in the nation at free throws attempted this season, with 447, almost 200 more than G-Town has. I’m not saying that the Minutemen would necessarily defeat GU, but that wide differential in free throws would definitely be something to consider before filling out a bracket - and something you wouldn’t necessarily know unless you followed college basketball’s regular season.

If the BCS determined a champion of college basketball, schools would follow the formula that has worked in football: play bad teams in the non-conference on your home campus, win your league, and hope the teams in front of you in the polls lose. But thankfully, college hoops has a better way of crowing the best in the land. The long and grueling regular season followed by the NCAA tournament means teams have to be consistently good throughout, then get hot at the end. Getting a better seed or tournament location, scouting different types of teams and preparing fans for the tournament all are important aspects of the basketball played between November and February.

They are also the reasons that the fans who say college hoops is only good come tournament time have no clue what they’re talking about.

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Eli Kaberon is a 2005 graduate of Evanston Township High School and currently is attending Columbia College in the loop, majoring in print journalism. A life-long fan of the Cubs, Bears and Bulls, Eli also works as a seat vendor at Wrigley Field and has sold hot dogs to everyone ranging from Bears tight end Greg Olsen to Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. Eli can be reached at ekaberon@yahoo.com.

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