The postseason saturation process

Allow me a rant in the blog today.  And the better to do it now rather than distract you all in February or March with it when it's more relevant.

We currently have about 3,582 bowls in college football (approximate).  The standard for being postseason eligible is low.  In basketball, a similar effect has taken hold with both the CBI and CIT.

About 10 or so years ago, we had the NCAA tournament and the NIT.  The NIT was a solid 32-team outfit.  But then they invited regular season conference champions to their tournament, and expanded their field to 40 to accommodate them.  It all fit perfectly.  Until the NIT decided to contract back down to a 32-team tournament, but keep their automatic bids for conference champions intact.

The result was a very restricted at-large field for the NIT, in which many teams each year all of a sudden missed the postseason altogether.  It all culminated in 2007, when a 26-7 Akron team that won the MAC East and lost its championship game by 1 point didn't even get a postseason bid.  And other good teams didn't get to the NIT either.  There was a common thread - these were poor mid majors.  Every year, there were maybe a dozen teams, give or take, that had legitimate gripes.

Enter the CBI.  Started in 2008, it was a 16-team postseason tournament for teams not invited to the NIT.  Clearly, there were deserving teams on board for it.  However, each school had to make financial commitments to the CBI to play, since this thing wasn't paying itself.  So while some teams here and there didn't play, quite a few good solid teams who deserved to go to the postseason got to play.  Also, some teams with losing records who may not have deserved to play got in as well.  Still, it was something.

Yet another postseason tourney started in 2009.  The CIT.  It started as 16 teams, and is now 32 teams.  It seems clear that they saw what the CBI did and wanted a piece of it.  However, they did instill two core concepts:  no teams with losing records in the field, and slant the selection of teams towards mid-majors and low-majors only.

So now both the CBI and CIT go about their business, adding 48 postseason teams every year.  However, before these tournaments existed, like I said above, maybe 10-15 teams got the shaft.  So now we have 48 spots for those 10-15 teams, and now we have a fair number of teams who frankly shouldn't be in the postseason.

If I were in charge of the college basketball world, how would I fix the postseason with regards to the CBI and CIT?

1) Reduce the size of both fields to 16 teams apiece.  I would have the CBI focus on invitations towards the upper-majors and high-majors (think top 12-15 conferences from my conference hierarchy) and have the CBI focus on the lower majors.  It's actually likely the CBI would have to dip lower for some "name schools".
2) Reinforce the .500 requirement.  All postseason teams should be at .500.  Occasionally you'll have a power conference team from a #1 conference go 15-16 (8-10) and not miss out, but I'm willing to live with that.
3) Reinforce conference finishes.  I'm much more willing to reward a team finishing 2nd in the MEAC than 5th in the CAA, for example.
4) Consider a neutral court final.  And have the CIT champions and CBI champions play each other.

Using these requirements, we'd have something like this for 2013:
CBI:
George Mason (18-14) at Richmond (18-14)
Santa Clara (21-11) at North Dakota St (24-9)
Bryant (19-11) at Vermont (21-11)
Charleston (24-10) at Lehigh (21-9)
Tulsa (17-15) at Western Illinois (22-8)
Wyoming (19-13) at Houston (19-12)
Western Michigan (20-12) at Wright St (21-12)
Eastern Kentucky (24-9) at Evansville (18-14)
CIT:
Air Force (17-13) at Cal Poly (18-13)
Oral Roberts (18-14) at Weber St (26-6)
High Point (17-13) at Northern Iowa (21-11)
Boston (17-12) at Loyola(MD) (21-11)
East Carolina (18-12) at Rider (18-14)
Kent St (20-13) at Gardner Webb (21-12)
South Alabama (17-12) at Elon (21-11)
Tennessee St (18-14) at Texas-Arlington (19-14)

16 teams cut from the postseason under this model, that went to the postseason last year:
Texas, Purdue (losing records)
Chicago St *had won Great West autobid, which doesn't exist anymore
UIC (17-15), Youngstown St (17-15), North Dakota (16-16), Hawaii (17-14), Hartford (17-13), Bradley (16-16), Hawaii (17-14), Tulane (19-14), Fairfield (19-15), Oakland (18-14), UC Irvine (20-15), Canisius (18-13), Savannah St (19-14) - most of these teams have marginal conference records and finished behind teams in conference that are in the CBI/CIT

(I may have chosen wrong on a few teams, it's possible I included/excluded the wrong teams in terms of merit.  Don't be offended if a team is mis-evaluated, that's not the point of this exercise)

(Also note that this analysis doesn't include teams that turned down postseason bids, including several decent SEC squads.  Under this model, it would stand to assume that the same teams would still turn down this tournament)

The above isn't a scientific breakdown so I may have missed a couple things, but with that caveat:  Do those last 16 teams really deserve the postseason?  Maybe a couple do, but they all had plenty of chances and whiffed.  We really wouldn't miss those teams in a postseason model like this.

Come on, CBI and CIT.  Get together, work together, let's trim the fat and get this postseason right.