A brief lesson in tournament theory

How am I supposed to get work done around here? The NHL and NBA are both starting their epic playoff process, Princeton baseball and both lacrosse teams are getting near their tournament seasons, not to mention a whole slew of other spring sports, some of whom have already finished up.

Tournament time is invariably the best time of year for a sports fan. Everyone who swore off baseball in April or college basketball in October has no choice but to be riveted. But I am sick and tired of tournaments with stupid rules that don't make any sense.

Here are Zack's Top 6 Rules for Running a Proper Tournament.

1. There should only be one "champion" of any division or conference.

Seems obvious, but we are possibly headed for a tie atop Ivy League men's lacrosse, where there are about 54,367 possible scenarios that will determine whether Princeton (3-1), Cornell (4-1), Brown (2-2), or Dartmouth (2-2) gets the Ivy crown, most of which are laid out quite nicely on goprincetontigers.com.

If both Cornell and Princeton win out, they will end the season with one loss apiece and tie for the league title, despite the fact that the Big Red just beat Princeton on Saturday. True, Cornell would get the automatic NCAA bid in that scenario by virtue of that win, but shouldn't they also win the league title outright? I'm not trying to diminish the Tigers' accomplishments, but doesn't it seem that there should be at least a playoff to determine a lone champion?

The fact is, no one wants to tie. Except for possibly an extreme underdog who wasn't supposed to be anywhere the near the top of the standings, I guarantee you any two teams would rather play each other once more for an outright title than settle for a tie. And even if not, that's what the public wants to see. Champion means the best — only one.

2. A conference or division champion should be guaranteed nothing more than a postseason birth.

This is one place where college gets it right. Men's basketball, lacrosse, several sports down the line — they all award winners of conferences with postseason births but not necessarily with higher seeds. This is necessary because since some of these sports have so many conferences, most of the teams never play each other, making it difficult to justify guaranteeing, say, the top 16 seeds to the 16 conference winners with the best records. You win your conference, you're in, but that's it. You might get the worst seed if the committee deems it necessary.

The pros screw this up so badly. Take the NBA this year. The two division winners in each conference get the top two seeds in their conference regardless of record. This is ridiculous. These teams all play each other at least twice, meaning there is little difference in strength of schedule, yet a team can win a division with a record worse than a team in the other division in the same conference and still get the two seed.

On what planet does this make sense? What is being rewarded here? Winning a crappy division? I give you this year's New Jersey Nets. Record-wise, they should be the three seed in the NBA East. Instead, they won the dime-a-dozen Atlantic Division with a wonderful 47-35 record. Eight teams in the league had a better record than this, yet somehow the Nets get the fourth-best seed of all.

3. Home court/field advantage should be decided by overall record, then head-to-head.

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Until last year, Ivy League baseball decided which school would host the Ivy League Championship Series based on which of its two divisions had the better overall record.

Read that again. I don't even want to get into how wrong this is. Everyone plays the same competition, therefore, whoever has the best record should be rewarded accordingly. In the event of a tie, it should go to head-to-head record, and then something else — anything that relates the abilities of the teams to each other and isn't just some arbitrary device. That better team should not be punished if the other teams in its division are awful. Kudos to Ivy baseball for figuring that one out.

The pros are all over this, too. The NBA, for instance, counters its seeding policy by giving home court advantage to the team with the better record, meaning that if the two and three seeds meet in round two, the three could have home court, and the elaborate tiebreaking procedures for the most preserve comparisons between teams directly.

4. There should never under any circumstances be first-round byes.

I enjoy it as much as any fan when my favorite NFL team does well enough to warrant one, but I do not think it's right. The top two teams in each conference in the NFL get a free pass through the first round. What if the third-best team has the same record as the second-best, only losing out by a series of wacky tiebreakers. Is that right to give a team with the same record as, or maybe only one game better than, another the enormous advantage of a first-round vacation?

Why not let eight teams into the playoffs in each conference instead of six? This would eliminate the need for byes, wouldn't detract one penny from the excitement, and would bring in revenue from two more merchandise producing teams. Everyone would be happy.

5. Teams should not re-bracket after each round.

This is the NHL's downfall. The hockey gods fix it so that, in round two, the highest seed remaining is playing the lowest seed remaining. This is the hardest one for me to back up, but it's also the one I'm most passionate about. Allow me to use an analogy:

You're a stripper in Las Vegas, making $500 a night.

No, that isn't going anywhere. Nevermind.

Here's the thing — I understand the purpose of re-bracketing, of rewarding the top teams by giving them the easiest path to the finals. This is too much of a reward. You work hard all regular season to establish yourself as the No. 1 seed, great. Here's your reward — the easiest theoretical path to the finals, meaning that if all the favorites win, yours will be the weakest teams remaining in each round. Why isn't that enough? Yeah, a one might end up squaring off against a four in round two while a six and a seven battle it out in the other conference semifinal, but so what?

My biggest problem with this method is that it also punishes the lower seeds. If the eight-seeded Denver Nuggets upset the top-ranked Minnesota Timberwolves (please, no) in the first round of the NBA playoffs this year, would it be just to force them to play the Lakers in round two? Why can't we just let things go? Let it play out.

What ticks me off most is that the league has no intentions of rewarding the best teams by doing this, either. It's all about ratings. The NHL is going down the toilet, and it will do anything to make its championship games interesting, even rig it so that the best possible matchup, seed-wise, is left in the end. But what guarantee is there that messing with everything will produce a better series?

Who knows, maybe next year they'll go straight to the Stanley Cup and skip the rest?

6. All series should be no more than best of five.

I know. The words "game seven" give me a chill, too, but 95% of the time, I'm not even tuning in to the series until game five, especially if it's a first or second round affair. There's just no point for the casual fan. Elimination games are the ones that matter, so why not get to them faster?

Changing to a maximum five-game format would solve many problems. First, players would have more left in the tank in the later rounds, as we could reasonably expect that they will have played upwards of eight fewer games over the course of the playoffs. Second, you could move things along more quickly, and playoffs that start in April wouldn't drag on until June. Third, people would actually watch a majority of the games. I don't care one lick about the Miami-New Orleans series in the NBA's first round, but if it were best of three, I'd be glued to the couch. Every game would be as intense as a game seven because they would all be that important. Lose one game and you're staring at elimination.

Of course, this will never happen. Having every series run seven games means more ticket sales, more merchandise sales, more TV revenue, and we all know that's what really matters in sports.

The closest thing we have to a perfect tournament is the NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments. Sixty-four teams all competing in a sequence of door-die games, every one of them truly like a game seven in the pros since one team is moving on and the other is going home. They don't re-bracket, they don't guarantee any seeding to anyone, and they aren't bound by divisions. It is as fair as it can be given the obvious subjectivity involved in the selection process. Records matter, of course, though they cannot be the sole determinant since schedules are so different. The committee is not always right, of course, but that's what makes the tournament fun — the upsets, the underdogs, the Princetons of the world going out and playing the game of their lives and beating a juggernaut, one game for all the marbles, no tomorrow.

Should the NBA, NHL, or MLB go to a one-game, multi-team format such as this? Probably not. A great series is still a great series, and there have certainly been some memorable seven-gamers in the past. But we can't deny that the NCAA hoops tourney is the best at attracting the casual fan.

Alas, we get what we get. Now back to the tedious, molasses-like NBA playoffs.