New Arch Madness Format Solves a Non-Existent Problem

Every year for over the past three decades, the Enterprise Center in St. Louis, Missouri, has been home to one of the best conference tournaments that mid-major college basketball has to offer. “Arch Madness” has a special feel to it. The fans are passionate, the programs are rich in tradition, and most importantly, teams have to earn it.

There were no shortcuts in Arch Madness. In my lifetime, you won three or four straight games to win the tournament and that was that. The stakes being that high made it special, and it still will be. Fans will still come and fans will still cheer, but Arch Madness as we know it is gone, and the league will be worse off for it.

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Arch Madness is Conforming

To be blunt, the Missouri Valley Conference is following a new trend among mid-major leagues. Over the past couple of seasons, we have slowly started to see mid-major conferences create these staggered brackets in order to give more of an advantage to the teams that did the best in the regular season. Take the Sun Belt for example. The Sun Belt’s top two seeds don’t have to play in the first five rounds of the conference tournament! Thankfully, the MVC has not gone to that an extreme of a level, but following the trend for the league is simply not necessary.

Over the past decade, there simply has not been the level of parody in Arch Madness that would require giving the top seeds an advantage. Since 2017, a top two seed has won Arch Madness six times; however, a top two KenPom team has won the tournament eight times. So the question has to be asked: If the best teams are usually winning, why do we have to protect them?

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There’s also the concept that there is no real elite program that is heads and shoulders above the rest of the league. Conferences like the Big South and the Southland, which have dominant programs, could benefit from a format like this because their best team has a much better chance of winning an NCAA Tournament game. That’s not the case…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/arch-madness-format-solves-non-160751563.html

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Publish date : 2026-06-22 16:07:00

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