Who's #1? Who Cares?

The last couple weeks have seen the end of the regular season for NCAA basketball, where the teams in each conference who have the best record get the honor of declaring themselves, well, nothing, really...

Thanks to the advent of the conference tournament, the regular season really means little more than trying to get enough wins to get yourself into the NCAA tournament. You don't win anything by having the best record. Instead, someone in a moment of brilliance said "Hey, I know how we can fleece more advertising dollars, and get some money from students who have nothing better to spend their cash on than, say, food, shelter, tuition, or books! Let's have a "tournament" to determing who the "champion" will be!" And everyone fell for it. So now, the regular season serves as nothing more than a seeding mechanism, which is kind of a shame, because that's where most of the work gets done.

Now I do like the idea of the NCAA tournament. It makes sense to grab the best teams from each conference and have them play each other for the best in the country. But when the conference gathers the teams that have already played together twice to play each other again to determine who's the best, well, there's nothing more to that than simple greed on the part of the conference.