National Basketball Championship

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The ball soaring towards the basket; flying all the way from half-court. Bang! The ball slams off the backboard and plunges onto the rim as 70,930 people fall into shock. Will the impossible happen? Unfortunately for the upstart Butler Bulldogs, Gordan Hayward's desperation heave at the buzzer of the 2010 NCAA National Championship game was 3 inches off the mark, allowing perennial power Duke to walk away with their fourht National Championship. However, Butler's magical run shows why the NCAA Tournament is such a great event and why it does its job as a fair way to decide the National Champion. Meanwhile, three months earlier, Boise State is stuck at home, wondering what could have been as they watch Alabama and Texas get the opportunity to play for the National Championship. Boise State was undefeated. The BCS system, which decides the two teams who get to play for the title in college football, is considered by many to be iniquitous and believe the sport should switch to a playoff format similarly to what is used in college basketball. The two championships are set up quite differently. The obvious difference is that the basketball format is a playoff, while in football only two teams get the chance to play. A committee of people come together and set up the basketball tournament by seeding the teams into four “brackets”, seeding the teams 1-17 in each bracket. The decision making process can be quite complicated. First of all, 30 teams automatically play their way into the tournament by winning their conference tournament. This means no matter how terrible a team played in the regular season, they still get the chance to play their way into the National Championship game. The only exception to this is the Ivy League. They do ... ... middle of paper ... ... truth is the reason that the college football universe is being prevented from getting a playoff. Even though in many ways a playoff is a fairer, more efficient, and more entertaining way of deciding the National Champion, money and power end up smothering this idea. Until the people with the power decide to finally do the right thing, there will always be teams such as Boise State or TCU on the outside looking in, wondering what could have been. Works Cited Eisenburg, Jeff. “How college hoops would look if the BCS replaced the NCAA tourney.” rivals.yahoo.com. 11 November 2010. Web. 22 November 2010. Murphy, Austin. “BCS supporters don’t get it: current system isn’t better than playoff.” www.si.com. 12 November 2010. Web. 22 November 2010. Murphy, Austin and Dan Wetzel. “Does it Matter?” Sports Illustrated. 15 November 2010: 42-48.

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