I think the play in games need to be for at larges. Let these 16 seeds have their moment in the actual tournament. I don't mind at all expanding the bubble a little bit and making all the play in games between 11 seeds
I think the exact opposite. It should be all 16 seeds.
You get in the 68 team field with your autobid. From there, there are no guarantees. Your resume should determine how hard your path is. The play-in games are, naturally, the hardest path.
The 15 and 16 seeds arent teams that simply had an easy SOS, did everything they could, and then got punished for things that were out of their control. Those teams are usually seeded higher, as they took care of business with what they had. As they should be. 15 and 16 seeds, almost universally, get those seeds because they usually had an easy schedule and still piled up plenty of losses against it.
Look at say...Gardner Webb. They went 0-3 against Q1, 1-0 against Q2 (A bad GT team), but 3-6 against Q3. And then 2 more sub-250 losses in Q4. They had plenty of opportunities in those games to move themselves off a bad seed line. Sure, they earned their way into the 68 team field by winning a championship, but they also
earned a low seed (and thus one of the toughest paths) by losing to a
lot of terrible teams. They
deserve to be in a play in game more than any of the at large teams, who all had to do much more (and would've been nowhere near the field with a Q3\4 record like that- we could compare to TCU, who didnt even make the field, yet had 3Q1 wins, a winning 6-4 Q2 record, and went undefeated vs Q3\4)
Arguably we're handing the lowest at larges the
hardest path, because they have to play a much tougher team than the 16 seeds just to reach the round of 64. That doesn't seem right to me when theyve done more to earn an easier path.
