I've Heard It All Before...

Conference Tournaments are all about the money.
Conference Tournament automatic bids make the regular season meaningless.
Twenty-loss teams water down the NCAA field.

It's all hogwash. And here's why.

Currently, we have 347 Division I programs. Around 337 schools (Sorry, Independents and UCONN) have a last-ditch chance to make it to the NCAA Tournament through Conference Tournaments.

They may not deserve it.
They may not have earned it in some people'e eyes.

But take away the automatic bids in Conference Tournaments and guess what we'll see?

Months of meaningless basketball for most.

What's an 0-10 team supposed to do at mid-season?

Try as hard as they can?
Put every ounce of energy into working on their free-throws?
Work harder and harder with their eye on getting better for next year?

They should do all of those things. But they wouldn't. They'd coast. And why not? With no miracle prize to dream about, there's no incentive to work hard and get better every day. And why play as hard as possible in a blowout game? The season's over in January.

With the automatic bid, fans have hope, too. Georgia fans can continue following the Bulldogs looking for signs of improvement, hoping to see the team get hot at the end of the year, like what happened in the SEC Tournament for Georgia a few years ago. Without the automatic bid, why would a Georgia fan follow their team? To see how well they play out the string?

Having an automatic bid to shoot for at the end of the year forces all teams to work hard, aiming to play their absolute best when it counts -- In March. The incentive works for 28-win teams and 28-loss teams. Everyone has a chance at the end, so everyone has incentive to improve every game regardless of the team's record.

When only the top third of schools are still in contention in January, the other two-thirds play for pride. And that's just not enough in the Big Sky Conference when you're 3-17 going into the last few weeks of the regular season.

In short, taking away the automatic bids represents the ruination of college basketball. Why ruin what works so well?