The Sun Belt Conference is using a Royal Rumble to name a champion

Everyone loves an underdog story in March. The NCAA Tournament has become an institution in the sports world because of the upsets each year. Fans of all different teams come together to watch a scrappy underdog no one had heard of two weeks ago take a Blue Blood down to the wire.

Those upsets help put teams, and sometimes an entire conference, on the map. So you can understand why a mid-major conference might want to put a thumb on the scale a little to help its best teams reach the Big Dance.

The Sun Belt Conference announced in August it would change the conference tournament format. According to the press release the changes were an effort to “prioritize the value of the 18-game conference regular-season.” In real-world terms that meant giving the teams that finished the regular season with the best records a bye deep into the conference championship. This, in and of itself, isn’t unusual. Plenty of conferences allow their top teams a straight pass into the quarterfinals. But that’s where the SBC made things a bit more interesting.

Instead of going with a more traditional 14-team bracket where even the worst of teams would only need to get hot for a day or two before having a chance at facing off against the conference’s best team, the Sun Belt has created an absolute gauntlet for teams. It looks more like rising up through the ranks of Mortal Kombat than a basketball tournament.

The top two seeds in the conference get a QUINTUPLE bye!

An 11-seed would need to win seven games in a row. Seven straight days of winning basketball without a break. The bottom four teams could be on a five-game win streak before playing a completely fresh and rested top seed. This is Edge sending the last man over the ropes of the Royal Rumble just to turn around to a Randy Orton RKO.

The thing is, this is absolutely genius.

Not only is it just a ridiculous bracket sure to get everyone’s attention, it will absolutely help the conference when it comes to the NCAA Tournament.

Winning a conference regular season championship is really hard. Mid-Major teams have to survive the early season matchups against a litany of Power Conference opponents then turn around and battle every day within their own conference. The teams that win the regular season titles in Mid-Majors are genuinely good teams. But unlike their more well-known counterparts, that means absolutely nothing. One bad night in the conference tournament almost certainly ends the season.

So doing what the Sun Belt has done significantly improves the odds of one of the best teams actually winning the conference. Therefore sending a conference’s best representative to the NCAA Tournament.

Some may look at this change and see it as a solution without a problem. How often does the best team not win anyway? Well, it turns out, quite a bit. Last year alone 11 teams outside of the Top 2 in the regular season conference rankings won a conference tournament, with five of those teams finishing with a record at or below .500 in conference. That’s a lot of upsets and a lot of conferences probably annoyed at its NCAA Tournament representation.

To further drive home the point, only two of those 11 teams reached the round of 32 with the average losing margin of 21 points in the round of 64. Those aren’t fun games. Of the five teams that made the tournament with conference records at or below .500, one lost in the play-in round and didn’t see the round of 64. The remaining four were blown out by an average of 27 points.

College basketball tournaments are still unpredictable and any team on any given night... blah blah blah.

This is giving fans exactly what they want. Most college basketball fans love seeing upsets in the NCAA Tournament. But finding out that 17-18 Montana State knocked off Montana to win the Big Sky championship is, well, basically a footnote.

Honestly, the best case scenario is one of those four bottom teams in the Sun Belt actually does go on a run. The college basketball world would love to focus in on the Sun Belt for a couple of days in early March as they learn about Coastal Carolina shocking the conference and reaching the quarterfinals. But for the Sun Belt’s sake, they would much rather see an actually good team win the automatic bid.