Rivalries the key for conference play

The overwhelming response from SportsZone readers was conference scheduling is not only a good thing, but it is the lifeblood of college hoops because it creates and maintains rivalries.

WELCOME TO KRZYZEWSKIVILLE

You may not envy Luis Villa now, as he spends hours each day sitting in a tent balancing his time between thermodynamics and hypothermia. But you'll envy him on Feb. 28, when he's 20 feet from the floor at Cameron Indoor Stadium as Duke squares off against North Carolina for the second time this season. One of roughly 1,500 Duke students who make up the tent village known as Krzyzewskiville outside Cameron, Villa is acutely aware of the value of a rivalry. Why else would this sophomore mechanical engineering/political science major brave the weather, random tent checks and his sanity for a basketball game? "The greatest regret of my short Duke life is that I chose not to camp out for last year's game," wrote Villa. "I was taking more than an average academic load, and thought I wouldn't have time." Tents start going up at the beginning of Spring semester (first day of classes was Jan. 15), with registration of tents starting either 10 days before the first tenting game (this year it was Jan. 29 vs. Maryland) or when 10 tents have been set up. Villa is part of a group of 15 students in Tent No. 7. Normally only 10 members are allowed in any one tent, but construction around Cameron this year cut the total number of tents allowed to 100 and the occupancy was expanded to 15. His group operates in shifts, with at least one person manning the tent at all times. The shifts usually last two hours, and Villa's group uses a web page to monitor schedules. Included on the page are links to who's done the most night shifts, a general weekday schedule, a phone list of the 15 members and links to current weather forecasts. Villa said he knows of at least four other tents with schedule pages. All this planning is necessary because the Duke student government has strict guidelines for K-Ville, which can also be found on the Web (www.duke.edu/dsg/kville/). Miss two checks and your tent gets "bumped" to the end of all registered tents. Get bumped twice and it's to the end of the wait list for you and your lazy tent-mates. The men and women who register and check the tents do have souls -- no checks are done during men's and women's home games or men's away games which are televised. Also, no checks were made between the hours of 3 p.m. and midnight ET on Super Bowl Sunday. This January, the area around Duke has experienced a record amount of rain, turning much of the area around Tent No. 7 into inches-deep mud. Amid the muck, students procrastinate, meet new people and do a fair share of partying between classes, tent checks and midterms. But isn't that what college is all about? "Except maybe when it is coldest, everyone is happy -- knowing that their friends at home don't understand, their parents often don't approve, and that it is all going to be worth it anyway," Villa wrote. -- Greg Collins

Where would we be this week if Duke and North Carolina were only the top two teams in the nation? The here-and-now would have plenty of implications regarding polls and NCAA seedings, but history would be lacking. Instead, we have a game that could fill volumes with anecdotes and fantastic finishes.

"Conference play is what college basketball is," wrote Wes Taylor of Bloomington, Ind. "The intense rivalries that are built from the years of tradition bring out the best games of the year."

There are two issues at stake here, whether conference play is necessary at all and whether it is necessary due to the proliferation of postseason conference tournaments.

These tournaments, while exceptional for creating fan interest over a very short time period, have rendered regular-season conference play less important in terms of winning the NCAA championship. A team can snooze through the season, then get hot for three games and Bam! it's in the NCAA Tournament -- no matter what its win-loss record or RPI.

"Why play a regular season only to have a tournament at the end?" asked Matt Smith of Salt Lake City. "Give the regular-season winner the automatic berth. If everyone has played everyone else already, the best team will have prevailed. The only thing a team gets out of the 10-15 games they play during the regular season is a seeding in the conference tournament."

Let's not insult everyone's intelligence by ignoring at what's driving most of these conference tournaments -- money. A conference tournament is a marketer's dream. You've got an easily packaged weekend outing with plenty of excitement, a regionalized market and brand-name recognition created by school loyalties. All that's missing is a slogan and a mascot.

"Remember the goose that laid the golden egg," wrote Chris Jeter of Malibu, Calif. "College basketball is about much more than TV ... it's about college tradition, which includes historic college matchups. These games create a sense of continuity for fans, especially alumni."

The debate comes down to priorities -- the journey or the destination. Playing the same eight or ten conference teams every year develops a rivalry, yes, but it also creates a history and hierarchy for those teams. Winning a conference tournament gets a team ultimately where it wants to go (the NCAA Tournament), but has that done a greater disservice to the sport in the progress?

The elimination of conference play would solve the problem of conference tournaments, but it would leave the entire 64-team tournament field in the hands of the selection committee. People already have enough problems with the committee's choices for at-large bids. Having the committee pick and seed all 64 teams without a frame of reference would let loose a furor not seen on this planet since New Coke.

That's not to say an open schedule is completely without merit.

"Mid-tier conferences always get the short shrift (for the NCAA Tournament)," wrote Lorne Schachter of Edison, N.J. "I like the idea of an open schedule, with some sort of requirement to play games outside of the region to get reasonable exposure."

But an open schedule brings up more problems than it solves. Logistics become a nightmare because 306 teams have to schedule with each other. With conferences, you can chalk up 16-20 games a year against opponents you know. More importantly, you can sell tickets to those games.

With an open schedule, teams must find the right balance of gates (games which bring in good crowds), gauges (to find out how good the team is) and gimmes.

In a broad sense, there must be some sense of shared worlds to develop a community. In college basketball, you can find 30 ready-made communities based on Division I conferences. Without conferences, there would be 306 teams floating in a sea of road trips to empty gyms, mismatches and no storyline.

But Travis Bowman of West Lafayette, Ind., has a solution that might make everyone happy.

"Play a preseason conference tournament, with seedings based on the previous year's standings, at a neutral site in late December or early January," wrote Bowman. "With the preseason format, you get the revenue from the fans, and I'm sure the television audience would still be interested in watching the competitive action. It would serve as a nice transition from preseason non-conference play to the heat of a two-month competition to decide who's the best in the conference."

Greg Collins is the men's college basketball editor at ESPN SportsZone. He can be contacted at gregc@starwave.com.