The significance of the Final Four (and not the [whatever] Two)

The Game Room
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Well, a not especially loopy or Cinderellay college basketball season (what the heck happened to Valparaiso, anyway?) wraps up tomorrow. The hype, for some reason, seems strangely subdued. Heck, I couldn’t even find the bracket on ESPN.com. (Hate the new format, BTW, and I think Twitter has way too much influence nowadays.) So I figure that this is as good a time as any to chime in with one of those sports minutiae thread I love so much. Heh…“Anne Frank”… :slight_smile:

As you may know, the Final Four, both the actual second-to-last round of the big dance and the meaning-laden words themselves, have next to mythic significance. Hell, the CBS show is called “Road to the Final Four”. I mean, it’s not nearly as egregious as “Sweet Sixteen”, as if the flippin’ third round of six held a dime’s worth of prestige in any sport (I made a thread about that once; it’s not here anymore for some reason), but it’s still a bit weird to have announcers saying that the semis are some kind of endpoint with a completely straight face.

Anyway, suffice it to say that the Final Four is a genuinely big deal. So much so that teams, and by extension coaches, are often judged by how many Final Fours they made it to. I read a news article a little while ago which said that Duke had now made it to 12 Final Fours, now tied for most all time. However, I always notice something missing from the equation. Final Fours are prestigious. Championships, of course, are incredibly prestigious (especially since this is a legitimate championship, unlike SOME college sports I could name). And yet somehow, no one…no one at all…ever mentions making the final.

Seriously. Nobody counts how many runners-up a college or coach has, no team has ever been burdened with the second-best label, like the Buffalo Bills or Minnesota Vikings or Chicago Cubs or Phil Mickelson, and, most egregiously, there is no cute trademarked name for the teams in final. When ESPN.com did polls on how far a team would go, there wasn’t even an option for runner-up. (Which, assuming the team was at least fairly strong, would make “Final Four” the obvious pick, as it covered two possible outcomes while every other option only covered one.)

I mean, I know the old saying “nobody remembers who finishes second”. (Tell that to Jean Van De Velde, but never mind…) But if we can glorify the [needlessly cute term for the third round] and the [needlessly cute term for the fourth round], not to mention the Final Four this damned Road is supposed to be leading toward in the first place, there surely is room to give SOME recognition to the silver medallist! I mean, I don’t expect the teams themselves to keep careful track of this, but there’s gotta be some reference, somewhere. This is the internet, for crying out loud.

[Obligatory sumo footnote: The Sumo Association records championships (yusho) and 2nd places (jun-yusho), but not 3rd place. They don’t even have a term for it. Granted, it’s sometimes a fairly big dropoff, but this is a sport that could use a few more numbers. Ah well.)

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That’s possibly because the final four is a thing. All of the games are played at one venue so all four teams make the trip to The Final Four. In the NFL and MLB conversely, they talk about trips to the Super Bowl or the World Series - the final two if you will. And they talk about making the playoffs. There seems to be much less talk about the final four. (Of course for a while, particularly in baseball, making the playoffs was the final four.)

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I think OldGuy is right. And the same for the Sweet Sixteen: you get to travel to a different city and you get most of a week off to celebrate between games, so that winning the second game seems psychologically like a bigger deal than winning the first or third.

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Another reason the Final Four is “a thing”; up until 1981, there used to be a third place game, since there was no “fourth place trophy.” Starting in 1982, the NCAA starting giving the “third place” (now “semi-finalist”) trophies to both teams that lost in the semi-finals, the way it did in the Division II and III football tournaments. Eventually, every NCAA sport would get rid of third place games, and even sports like wrestling or track & field where third place could be determined “normally” gave out fourth place trophies.

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There’s 351 schools fielding teams in Men’s Division I basketball. That’s an order of magnitude bigger than most of the common pro leagues and almost triple the number of teams playing FBS college football. Less than 20% of teams even make the tournament as opposed to say the NBA where just over half the teams make the playoffs. The last 4 teams represent a smaller proportion of total Division I basketball teams than making say the National Championship game in college football. Making it even as far as the Sweet Sixteen stands out more than making it through the NFL playoffs to the Super Bowl. Getting to the Final Four is an achievement that the semi-final round isn’t for most sports championships.

The nature of the tournament drives the coverage too. Single elimination weekend games are followed by almost week long breaks for sports media to fill. The time for media coverage is weighted towards Sweet Sixteen and Final Four teams instead of teams that make it through the first game of the respective weekend. It’s simply the nature of the beast which is relatively unique for sports tournaments.

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Here is a list of all of the teams that finished second in the NCAA Division I men’s basketball championship.

Also, Jean van de Velde tied for second with Justin Leonard.

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The Wisconsin-Kentucky game was the highest rated Final Four game in almost 35 years, and that’s saying something because it was only on cable. So subdued it wasn’t.

The problem with the Final and the second place team is that they only have 36 hours to hype the game. College football has a month. The Super Bowl two weeks. Baseball takes at least a week to conclude, basketball and hockey more than that.

If they had a week to hype the teams, you’d remember the second place finisher more.

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Wow, that was fast! Much appreciation, as always, for the informative responses. Just a few things…

That Don guy - I honestly had absolutely no idea that the NCAA gave out third place trophies. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s awesome, it’s just…a bit antithetical to how you expect bigtime American sports to work. Of course, given that we never actually see these trophies being handed out on television, that probably has to take some of the sting away.

Lamar Mundane - Oh, of course the GAME wasn’t subdued (nor should it have been, it was a back-and-forth slugfest until the very end). I’m talking about hype. I remember a time when bracket talk was everywhere, there were endless college basketball-related commercials, and even the local newspapers got in on the act. (Oh, and that CBS jingle playing something like 800 times…yeah, I’m thinking a lot of us don’t miss that.) This year…not so much. I think it’s a lack of big drama more than anything. Kentucky is a powerhouse, with the second most championships after UCLA, so I don’t think a lot of the country was really rooting for them to go perfect (I sure hope not, anyway), Duke lived up to the billing, I haven’t seen the word “Cinderella” once (Again, what happened to Valaparaiso? Were they just a fluke or something?), and none of the 12 seeds made it out of the first round (man, it’s seems like it’s been a while since we’ve had that).

Incidentally, how exactly does Duke measure up in all metrics: championships, finals, and final fours? From what I’ve seen they’re a ways behind Kentucky, but not much.

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There are second place trophies as well - they look just like the championship trophies, except that the gold-colored parts are silver-colored. What surprised me was when they started awarding fourth place team trophies in sports like track & field and wrestling.

Also, men’s basketball doesn’t have “national semi-finalist” trophies any more; instead, there are four bronze trophies labeled “Regional Champion” that they award at the end of each Elite Eight game. I am not sure if the two teams in the championship game get to keep their bronze trophies or not, since they get gold/silver trophies as well.

This doesn’t apply to FBS football, which is not an “NCAA Champoinship” (for various political reasons, almost all of which have to do with who would control the money generated from the TV contract), and which actually has three different championship trophies - one for the “national championship game” winner, one (the “crystal football”) to the team voted as national champion by the American Football Coaches Association (back in the BCS days, there was a requirement that the coaches had to vote for the BCS champion, but this is not the case with the new playoff), and one to the team voted as national champion by the Associated Press sportswriters. However, under the new playoff system, it is almost impossible for either the coaches or sportswriters to vote a team other than the championship game winner as their national champion. (Well, the AP can vote a team with a postseason ban as its national champion, but I am not 100% certain that the team would be allowed to accept the trophy. Then again, when USC was retroactively stripped of its 2004 BCS national championship, there was no mention that the NCAA made them give back their AP National Championship trophy.)
There is a similar “crystal basketball” trophy awarded to the NCAA men’s basketball champion. In fact, at Florida’s first practice of the 2006-07 season, the coach displayed the crystal trophy Florida won in 2006 - and dropped it; it turned out to be a prank, and the “trophy” he dropped was not the real one. Something similar happened (to the real trophy, this time) at Alabama in 2012 at its spring football game.

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I remember when UCLA lost in the semi-final round to NC State in 1974, there was speculation that they may not show up to play Kansas for 3rd place. They did, but it probably put the idea in a few big wigs heads that some day a team would refuse to play.

From 1960-1969 the NFL tried a similar game. Officially it was the Bert Bell Benefit Bowl but more commonly it was known as the Playoff Bowl.  The vast majority of players and coaches hated it.