With the news that the men’s and women’s NCAA Basketball Tournaments will be expanding to 76-team fields, plus the start of the collegiate softball postseason with baseball’s Selection Monday only a couple of weeks away, I was thinking about all the different forms that collegiate sports’ postseasons take.
There’s football, with its dozens of essentially meaningless bowl games in addition to the 12-team playoff. I don’t know that this is anybody’s favorite except for maybe fans of teams who expect to be in that top 12 year after year; all the other bowl games have become glorified exhibitions, there’s no real upset potential when you’re already limiting the field that much, and every attempt to create suspense as to who’s going to make the field has ended up just translating into blatantly, horrifically unfair treatment of clearly deserving teams.
There’s basketball’s classic March Madness, where between the men’s and women’s tournaments, you get to see 64 games in two days — there’s not a lot that’s quite like that opening-weekend chaos. Single-elimination basketball makes every possession feel so incredibly high-stakes, and it’s where we’ve seen so many enduring stories be written: of monumental upsets, of Cinderella squads, of teams of destiny, of redemption, of dominance. Maybe UNC fans are going to be biased given that a lot of our most foundational sports memories are of winning this tournament, but the format certainly also lends itself to a lot of drama.
I wonder if the playing surface makes a difference for fan enjoyment. The men’s tournament is unique in that every game is played at a technically neutral site; higher seeds play closer to home within constraints of the region into which they’re assigned but nobody is playing on their home court. In the women’s tournament, top-4 seeds host the first two rounds, then games move to neutral sites for the Sweet 16 and beyond. In college soccer, which has a similar bracket set-up (the women have a 64-team bracket, while only 48 teams get to play in the men’s postseason), higher seeds host individual games all the way up until the College Cup (semifinals and finals), giving home fans a lot more of a chance to watch their team work through the tournament. Volleyball is somewhere between them; all games up to the semifinals are played at the regional host’s home stadium.
And then there’s baseball and softball’s College World Series, which uniquely among college sports (at least the ones I’m aware of) do not have single-elimination postseasons. Regionals are four-team double-elimination brackets, Super Regionals are best of three, and then rinse and repeat in Omaha/Oklahoma City. On one hand, this format reduces chaos on a macro level, because it’s less likely that the better team will lose 2 out of 3 than that they’ll lose one out of one. On the other hand, a team needs to win a ton of games to win the whole dang thing, and winning is hard. Some will say that these are the hardest postseasons to win because they require the most winning, especially in sports that are as dominated by offensive failure as these. Others will say this postseason gives teams second chances that the others don’t. Again, there’s going to be bias among UNC people, because the Diamond Heels, along with Arkansas and Florida State, have a rich history of being perpetual bridesmaids in Omaha but never quite clearing the final hump.
So which of these, as a sports fan, is your favorite postseason? Or is there one in an individual or less publicized sport that you prefer? Are there any sports in which you’d like to see a more professional-style playoffs, maybe with longer series (or, in the case of basketball, series at all)? I’d love to see your thoughts.
