UCLA’s Home Court Disadvantage
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MINNEAPOLIS -- Well, of course UCLA wasn’t happy about having to travel cross-country to play a second-round NCAA tournament game against Villanova in Philadelphia.
And of course some UCLA fans will use that as an excuse for the Bruins’ getting pounded Saturday by the Wildcats, 89-69.
Response: Go rent ‘The Bad Seed.’
UCLA won two of its 11 national titles--1968 and 1972--at the Los Angeles Sports Arena.
Hmmm. Was that a home-court advantage?
Here’s the thing about the NCAA tournament since it expanded to 64 teams in 1985--it’s become complicated.
I wrote a story last week detailing some of the reasons why teams with weaker seedings get shipped across the country.
The NCAA didn’t conspire to punish sixth-seeded UCLA. The Bruins conspired against the Bruins by failing to win either the Pac-10 regular-season title or the conference tournament.
The NCAA selection committee’s primary goal is to produce a fair and balanced bracket. It tries to reward success. The committee tries to geographically protect the first four seeding lines in the first round.
Lesson: Try to be a No. 4 or better.
‘At some point when you get down into the bracket, you have to move teams around,’ NCAA selection committee Chairman Mike Slive said recently. ‘It got very complicated this year, probably as complicated as any bracket we’ve done, because you had three conferences with seven teams, two conferences with six teams...’
With so many schools from major conferences, and so many bracket rules to follow, there was no way to satisfy everyone. One rule specifies the top three schools from each conference must be in different regionals, which automatically put Washington, Arizona State and UCLA in different states.
Jet lag may have had something to do UCLA’s loss to Villanova.
Villanova may have had a lot to do with it.
But it wasn’t the bracket’s fault.
--Chris Dufresne
