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The New Big 12 Tournament Format

Last week, the Big 12 announced that they'll be changing the format of their postseason conference tournament beginning with the 2006 season. The new format, replacing the medium-old-style CWS format with two double-elimination four-team brackets leading to a single championship game, will consist of two four-team pools playing round-robin schedules, with the pool winners playing a single championship game. In general, I like it, but I'm a fan of pool play in general, so let's look at it in a bit more detail:

• The single biggest plus is that the schedule can be completely determined, with the exception of the participants in the championship game, as soon as the field is known. One of the big hazards of tournament play for most fans is the uncertainty of when the team you're following will be playing, as well as the lack of knowing when marquee matchups will occur. This change is worth quite a lot in terms of the fan experience.

• Each team is guaranteed three games, which eliminates the current possible problems with the potential for a two-week layoff for a rotation starter. On the other hand, no one will play more than four games, so you're not going to stretch the staff the way you can trying to come back out of the losers' bracket.

• From a financial standpoint, it's easier with this format to maximize attendance by placing the big ticket matchups in the evening slots. It should also be possible to smooth out the amount of time between games for any given teams, so there are fewer of those play-until-midnight-and-then-start-at-ten-am times that players and fans both love so much.

• One of the hazards of pool play is the question of what to do with ties. They've handled that reasonably well here -- in two-team ties, the head-to-head winner takes the pool, while three-team ties are won by the highest seed. This wouldn't work at the national level, where seeding is a joke, but in this context it makes sense; regular season success should be rewarded.

• The biggest negative that I can see is another of the bugaboos of pool play -- there will be teams on the third round of games whose only remaining role is that of spoiler. For most Big 12 teams, though, there will be postseason considerations that will keep them playing hard to go 1-2 rather than 0-3, which could be the kiss of death when the committee sits down that weekend.

In an attempt to see what the practical implications were of this, I ran the numbers for the odds (based on my usual ISR-based probability formula) of winning the tournament under the two formats were for last year's field:

Seed  Team            Old    New

  1   Nebraska         25     30
  2   Baylor           20     27
  3   Texas            38     29
  4   Missouri          5      6
  5   Oklahoma          6      4
  6   Oklahoma State    2      1
  7   Kansas            1      1
  8   Texas Tech        3      2

The numbers don't change a huge amount, but they do change enough to make it interesting. On the one hand, the more games you play, the more likely it is that the better team will triumph, which is why Nebraska and Baylor improve, and why the small percentages shrink even more. On the other hand, the tie-breaker factor means that Texas is at a disadvantage to Baylor, so their overall chances drop.

To get another feel for things, I ran last year's SEC field through the two formats (just to be clear, the SEC is not changing; they were just a convenient comparison):

Seed  Team              Old    New

  1   Florida            14     23
  2   LSU                13     20
  3   Tennessee          11     12
  4   Mississippi        24     22
  5   Alabama             7      6
  6   South Carolina      9      7
  7   Mississippi State  10      5
  8   Arkansas           10      5

The differences will always depend largely on the shape of the conference -- you can see the difference here in having three contenders and four -- but one thing that's clear is that it's going to be a very big deal to finish first or second in the regular season.

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