It seems to have become the common wisdom that, since you have to win
all of your tournament games to be champion, then it doesn't matter how
the tournament is seeded.  I disagree on two counts.  First, simply
making it to the Final Four is both a reward and an accomplishment.  I,
for one, have many fond memories of years where my team went to the
Final Four but didn't win it all.
 
In the larger picture, my response to this line of thinking is, 'Why
bother seeding any tournament at all?'  Put together your conference
tournament randomly.  What would it have mattered if, say, Michigan and
Michigan State had met in the first round of the CCHA playoffs?  They
had to face each other before it was resolved anyway.
 
Almost any tournament you'll find anywhere seeds its participants.  If
you find a major violation of this, it's usually signalling a serious
problem (I direct your attention to Major League Baseball's ungodly
method of figuring out who plays whom).  NCAA hockey has now arrived at
this point.  Teams are not rewarded for their regular season
performance.
 
We live (unfortunately in my view) in a society that only seems to value
the BIG TROPHY.  Look at the way the Detroit Red Wings are viewed after
setting a record for wins in a season.  Look at the number of people on
this list who are saying that winning the tournament is all that we
should be concerned about.  The regular season seems viewed as important
only in the way it positions everyone for the play-offs.  Yet here we
have a situation where the 4th-best regular season (by the NCAA's own
standards) produces what is functionally the #8 seed in the tournament.
 Thus, the regular season is made to count for even less.
 
There seems to be the perception that I'm objecting to this as a
Minnesota fan.  I will concede that this undoubtedly fuels the anger
with which I'm writing, but I would feel the same way about this result
even if it were some other team.  A seeding system that considers
regular season performance to be largely irrelevent is just simply
wrong.
 
J. Michael Neal
 
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