March Madness can do without these tourneys

Conference playoffs are an unnecessary evil for players, fans.

It’s conference tournament time in college basketball.

Excuse the yawn. This smorgasbord of unnecessary games has become another blight on a sport that already has enough problems, denying worthy teams their wellearned shot at the NCAA Tournament while taking an enormous physical toll on the players. And judging from all the empty seats, many fans couldn’t care less about this exercise in repetition.

John Calipari summed it up best.

“We already have a league champ,” the Kentucky coach told reporters before the SEC Tournament. “What are we doing this for?”

For the money, of course. Much like the plethora of meaningless college football bowls, these tournaments exist largely to provide a glut of television programming and churn out even more revenue for the schools. The bigger conferences can really rake in the cash over a four- or fiveday period, and there’s the added benefit of perhaps landing an extra NCAA bid should a lower-seeded team pull off an upset to grab the automatic spot.

Financially speaking, it makes perfect sense. That doesn’t make it right. Let’s consider the health of the players, since it’s clear the powers-that-be aren’t giving it a second thought. In this era of overgrown leagues, the ACC, SEC and Big Ten Tournaments have all mushroomed into five-day affairs, which means a lowseeded team that makes an unexpected run to the title game would have to play five games within 120 hours.

It hasn’t happened yet, but Michigan did play four straight days on the way to its triumph in the Big Ten Tournament.

Maybe if these tournaments were hugely popular with the fans, it might easier to justify their continued existence. But the 18,000-seat Amway Center in Orlando wasn’t even halffilled for the opening night of the American Athletic Conference Tournament. The Capitol One Arena in Washington was more than twothirds empty for the second round of the Atlantic 10 tournament. Barely 2,000 fans turned out in the 20,000seat Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland for the Mid-American quarterfinals — which was still roughly double the size of the crowd (or, more accurately, gathering) for the Big Sky tourney in Reno that same night.

Further compounding the lack of atmosphere, leagues have gotten the bright idea of branching out to non-traditional locales, all with the notion of expanding their “footprint” (translation: make even more money).

When bitter rivals Alabama and Auburn faced off Friday in the SEC quarterfinals — in St. Louis, of all places — the arena could’ve passed for a library. North Carolina and Duke are used to feuding on Tobacco Road, but the ACC moved its tournament to Brooklyn this year in an effort to crack the lucrative New York market. Michigan beat Purdue for the Big Ten title at Madison Square Garden, where more than 4,000 seats went unsold for the championship game.

Here’s a better idea: Let’s dump all these silly conference tournaments, award automatic bids to the real champions, and get on with the tournament that really matters a week earlier. The NCAAs should be expanded to at least 96 teams — still a relative smidgen out of more than 350 Division I schools.

We’ll give Calipari the last word.

“I can’t stand conference tournaments,” he said. “The next one is the real one.”

ANDY LYONS / GETTY IMAGES “We already have a league champ,” says Kentucky coach John Calipari, who is not a fan of conference tournaments. “What are we doing this for?”