Fans of four-year college basketball understand that conference play is important. In junior college basketball, it is not only important, but it is the only thing that matters in terms of reaching the postseason. Non-conference games help voters determine state and national rankings, settle bragging rights and give teams a taste of what's out there competitively, but they are meaningless in determining who qualifies for the postseason.
That's because each conference sends a select number of representatives to the Florida Community Colleges Activities Association/National Junior College Athletic Association Region VIII Tournament, held each March at Chipola College in Marianna, and those representatives are decided based solely on conference record and/or a conference tournament. In theory, a team could go winless in non-conference play, finish first in their conference and reach the tournament 10 or 12 games below .500.
Now's the point where we need to talk about the slightly different playoff systems that govern women's and men's basketball. Click through for the details.
Women's: The FCCAA is comprised of all the teams in Florida, and they are divided into three conferences, the Mid-Florida, the Panhandle and the Southern. That's an odd fit for the eight-team state tournament, so the FCCAA has established a rotation: each year one conference gets two representatives, while the other two conferences each get three. This year it's the Southern Conference's turn to send two teams; in 2011 the Panhandle is up, and in 2012 it's the MFC's turn. The invariable result of this system is that the tournament never features the top eight teams in the state. For example, right now the top four teams in the FCCAA top 10 are from the Panhandle Conference, but one of them will be squeezed out of the postseason.
The Mid-Florida only has four teams, so each team plays the other conference teams three times apiece for a nine-game conference schedule. The team with the best conference record is crowned the champion - no conference tournament or anything - and conference record determines the conference's other tournament representatives as well.
Once the eight teams are decided, it's time to place them in an eight-team, single-elimination tournament. This too is done on a rotation, designed to pit conference champions against other conference's non-champions. The FCCAA doesn't actually seed the teams 1-8, but simply crafts a bracket that favors the conference champs and avoids first-round matchups between teams in the same conference. Here's this year's matchups:
Mid-Florida champion vs. Panhandle third-place
Southern runner-up vs. Panhandle runner-up
Southern champion vs. Mid-Florida runner-up
Panhandle champion vs. Mid-Florida third place
Careful analysis of that bracket will reveal another quirk, again involving the Panhandle - for a Mid-Florida team such as Central Florida, finishing second in the conference would yield a slightly more favorable first-round matchup than winning the conference. Based on current rankings, CF would play No. 3 Tallahassee if its win the Mid-Florida, or No. 5 Indian River State if it finishes second. Of course, it's very bad form to intentionally lose for any reason, no matter how well-intentioned. Plus you'd have to play the Panhandle eventually anyway, so you might as well try to win your conference and have something to hang in the gym.
So the team still standing at the end of the eight-team tournament is crowned the FCCAA state champion. But it doesn't quite end there. The reason the tournament is called the FCCAA/NJCAA Region VIII Tournament is because it doubles as a qualifier for the NJCAA Tournament, held later in March in Salina, Kan. That tournament includes the champions of the 16 NJCAA regions, including Region VIII, which is Florida. So the tournament does double duty in deciding a state champion and sending a representative to the national tournament. Next time Central Florida qualifies for the national tournament, I'll make an attempt at explaining how those 16 teams are seeded. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Men's: Thanks to a handful of schools with men's basketball teams but no women's basketball program, the FCCAA men's basketball teams are divided into four conferences rather than three. Those conferences are the Mid-Florida, the Panhandle, the Southern and the Suncoast. That makes the math work much easier for an eight-team tournament. And predictably enough, each of the four conferences sends two teams to the FCCAA/NJCAA Region VIII Tournament. But the decision-makers have found a way to make it complicated anyway.
For our purposes, I'll just talk about how the Mid-Florida Conference decides its two teams. With five teams in the conference, each team plays its conference opponents twice each for a tidy eight-game conference slate. The team with the best record at the end of that is crowned conference champion. The runner-up, however, doesn't just get that second spot. The remaining four teams are left to battle it out. A simple four-team tournament, winner goes to the postseason? No, that isn't convoluted enough. In fact, the two teams with the worst conference records play each other for the right to play the team with the third-best conference record, and the winner of that game then faces the team with the second-best conference record. Each of these games take place on the home floor of the team with the better record. This series of games is collectively called the conference tournament, and allows the surviving team to refer to itself as "conference tournament champion," even though "champion" in that context technically means "second place." That goes on the mantle next to the trophy from Everybody Gets a Trophy Day.
So in theory, a team could go winless in conference play, rattle off three wins in the tournament and qualify for the postseason. But the deck is decidedly stacked against that happening, and it would be cool anyway if it did happen, as long as it didn't happen at the Patriots' expense.
So once each conference has discerned the two teams it sends to the tournament, those teams gather at Chipola College in Marianna for the tournament. In fact, the men's and women's tournaments are all smushed together over four days: women's first-round games; men's first-round games; women's and men's semifinals; and women's and men's championship games. If you're wondering why the tournament is held at Chipola, on the home floor of one of the participants, rather than a neutral site, you will be among many people who have wondered the same over the years. The answer is that the cost to occupy a neutral site for four days has been deemed prohibitive and Chipola was the FCCAA member school to submit the winning bid to host the event. That won't change for at least four years, including the current season.
Back on topic - the bracket is rotated each year to ensure that the same two conferences aren't always paired up. Here's this year's bracket:
Suncoast champion vs. Southern runner-up
Panhandle champion vs. Mid-Florida runner-up
Southern champion vs. Panhandle runner-up
Mid-Florida champion vs. Suncoast runner-up
Clearly, Central Florida's preferred path is to win the Mid-Florida and face the Suncoast second-place team, which will likely be a tough opponent like Hillsborough, State College of Florida or St. Petersburg but is better than drawing the Panhandle runner-up, considering the Panhandle has the top three teams in the FCCAA poll. From there it's all the same as above - the winner of the tournament becomes state champion and is among one of 16 teams tossed into the NJCAA Tournament (the men's is held in Hutchinson, Kan.).
So that's how that works. Tune in next week when I tell you how styrofoam is made.
