UConn's fills its section with fans from Rice and University of Houston

Congratulations to the UConn Huskies for winning the 2011 NCAA basketball title.

Good. Now that we got the pleasantries out of the way, I implore CBS to please burn every last copy of last night’s debacle.

In an unwatchable low scoring affair, lowest scoring since 1946, UConn and Butler tortured a national audience for 3 straight hours before the Huskies emerged victorious from the virtual slap fight. By the time the buzzer sounded at halftime, the scoreboard at Houston’s Reliant Stadium read Butler 22, UConn 19. That’s right, 22 points in a half. The last time a game ended in a similarly low scoring affair, columnists decried it as the death of basketball.

The second half didn’t fare any better, Butler followed up their 22-point first half performance with a 19-point egg in the second. It was a display of offensive ineptitude that would even make Ed DeChellis blush. Butler finished the game shooting just 18.8 percent (12 for 64), including just 3 of 31 shots from the 2-point range, the worst performance in title game history. UConn was only slightly better at 34.5% scoring a total of 53 points eventually winning the title game by 12 points against a team that shot under 20%. Ouch.

Even the commentators assembled by CBS couldn’t salvage the first half train wreck. During the halftime show, the disgust was unanimous.

“First of all, I’m gonna be honest: This is the worst half of basketball I’ve ever seen in a national championship game.” Greg Anthony

“It’s almost like these two teams are competing to see which can play worse … This is a very bad showcase for a national championship game for college basketball.” Seth Davis

“A team made six field goals and has the lead. That’s sad. That was an awful half of college basketball.” Charles Barkley

It’s pretty bad when analysts rip a game on their own network that badly, let alone one that’s at halftime but it’s pretty hard to argue otherwise, the game was turning out to be a stinker. And I can’t say I was really that surprised. This is the risk you run when deciding a champion using a 6 round tournament. Don’t get me wrong, the NCAA tournament is one of the most, if not the most entertaining postseason format in any sport, but it isn’t any better at creating a legitimate title game than say – the BCS.

At the very least, despite all the whining and backlash, the 2 teams the computers and poll voters eventually select for the BCS Championship Game both have legitimate arguments as to why they are the best in the country in each given season.

You’ll be hard pressed to convince me how a team that was barely best in it’s own league is somehow now the best in the nation simply because of a spectacular run in March. Last nights tournament title game matched a team that finished 9th in it’s own league during the regular season against one that was seeded 8th. Even the seeded lineup for the Final Four (3, 4, 8 and 11 seed) read more like a pre-season tournament than one to decide the 2010-11 season champion. So much for a playoff not devaluing the the regular season.

For the NCAA to claim that the Selection Committee values a team’s regular season performance, then proceed to expand the tournament to allow a few more undeserving teams a shot at the national title simply for a bit more television revenue is pure hypocrisy. It’s tough enough to argue how the 16th seeds are deserving of a spot in the tournament or adds any competitive value, let alone add 3 more teams to an already bloated playoff.

The Wall Street Journal even simulated what a basketball style playoff would look like in college football. They filled out the bracket by matching each basketball team with their equivalent football team based on the final computer rankings from the 2010 college-football season then played out the tournament in the exact same manner that the basketball tournament has gone. The end result is a Final Four lineup of Northern Illinois (Butler’s equivalent), Air Force (our VCU doppelganger), Oklahoma State (Kentucky’s stand-in) and Virginia Tech (UConn’s correlate). Please excuse me while I throw up a little.

The simulation highlights a glaring flaw of tournaments, the most-deserving teams, the ones that had the best seasons, sometimes don’t get anywhere near the championship. The college football postseason on the other hand, though also flawed and far more hated, does provide a final slate of games that features the best overall teams playing one another (in bowl games) for all the marbles.

But a 68 team playoff is the postseason format we are stuck with for determining a basketball champion and UConn did exactly what it had to do to win the title. Never mind that the Huskies actually lost 7 of their final 11 games to end the regular season before going on a 11 game win streak through the Big East and NCAA tournaments for the title.

So congratulations to the UConn Huskies for a remarkable run and winning the NCAA Tournament Title. Just don’t try to convince me that a playoff is better than the BCS in determining a national champion. If we learned anything last night, it’s that it isn’t and sometimes it is possible to have too many upsets. And when that happens, the end result just isn’t pretty.