Kentucky coach John Calipari has a notorious hatred of the SEC Tournament – particularly how it has apparently held little weight in determining NCAA Tournament seeding.
So during the SEC’s spring meetings, Calipari put forth a novel idea: turn the tournament into a preseason affair, just to cement how little it actually matters.
“You know my stuff is like so ridiculous you say, what?” Calipari said, via Jon Solomon of CBS Sports. “I said let’s not have a postseason tournament. Let’s have a preseason tournament where you’re guaranteed three games. So if you lose, you play, you play, and you go somewhere and all the fans come in and you celebrate our league and they’re great games to start the year.
“You guys know I’m not a big proponent of the league tournament. I hope you know why now. If you lose in the first round of our league tournament, you’re out, you’re done. That’s not the case in most of these other leagues. And if you win our conference tournament, it doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t move the needle. Tournaments really don’t matter. Let’s just say that and let’s go play, especially in our league.”
Naturally, Calipari’s preseason tournament proposal was not adopted. I suspect he feels he’s made his point anyway. Calipari went off on the Selection Committee in March when his Wildcats were given a lower seed than Texas A&M despite beating them in the SEC Tournament final. In his mind, there’s no point to playing the postseason tournament because it doesn’t impact anything. A lot of people would probably disagree with that.
