The Sun Belt Conference is a group of 14 colleges spread out between Virginia and Texas. For its basketball tournaments, both on the men’s and women’s sides, the shape of the competition bracket is unique in college basketball, if not in all of sport.
Usually, in every elimination tournament (as opposed, say, to a league phase), the qualified teams are collected, then put into a bracket which is based on the highest number of a square of 2 that covers the number of participants. If there are, say, 68 teams in the bracket like in NCAA Division I men’s and women’s basketball, you need a 64-team bracket (i.e., 2 to the 6th power), and four play-in games to cut the number down to 64.
In sports from NHRA drag racing to high-school soccer, tournament brackets are run this way — single elimination in a bracket with a square of 2, play down to one winner.
But the Sun Belt’s basketball competition, for both men and women, have hit upon a unique formula to choose the conference’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament. Instead of playing the usual bracket, the conference has hit upon the “stepladder” format.
In this tournament, the four lowest-ranked teams play two games on the first day. The winners of those two games take on the lowest-ranked teams left, and the process continues over seven rounds, with teams looking to keep their winning streak alive until the top two seeds enter the tournament at the end.
I get what the SBC is trying to do. In this tournament, a maximum of two games are played every day. In some conference tournaments, with eight, 12, or even 16 teams competing, you see four games played per day in the same building, which does lead to a certain amount of fan fatigue.
But having so many teams playing in this bracket, including some two- or three-win teams, there’s no chance any of them are likely to take on the top two seeds, having to win six full games in six days to even have a chance to get into Division I March Madness.
I sincerely hope this is only a one-off experiment, and other conferences don’t get hold of this blueprint.