Nothing spells anti-climax like conference tournaments. What a great way to over-due good rivalries and render an emotional, thrilling regular season essentially meaningless.
Honestly, what is the point of these things? All season we see game after game be built up as absolutely crucial to a team's season, but then that is all erased in the first week of March. The good and the bad of the season can be forgotten, and while some might see this mulligan as a positive, I think it is all quite shady.
In fact, it is all downright cheap.
"Wait, it's ok that Florida State was awful all season, if they can win four games this weekend they get to go to the NCAA tournament anyway!"
Worse yet is the fate of the small-conference teams that dominate their conference all season, then are rewarded with a big bull's eye on their chest and a three-day gauntlet to survive in order to claim the NCAA tourney berth that should already be rightfully their anyway. Those kids play a whole season to make it to the NCAA tourney, but really the best they can do is earn the right to have to beat bad or middling teams for a second or third time to actually punch their ticket to The Big Dance.
Even great rivalries like Duke-North Carolina lose luster when they come around for a third-time in this made-for-TV event. Generally, if the two teams meet in the conference tourney they have already played a pair of games that were billed as the games of the year and one of them may have even already won the conference. Now we get a canned, second-rate third version of the vintage with a pair of teams playing at half-strength because they are playing on back-to-back or back-to-back-to-back nights.
