Why hoops' regular season rules, early bubble teams, more thoughts

If this was college football, UCLA's loss to Michigan earlier this month would have knocked the Bruins out of national title contention. Getty Images Seth Davis's Mailbag Seth Davis will periodically answer questions from SI.com users in his Hoop Thoughts column. Name: Email: Hometown: Question: SEND

Now that college football's BCS madness has been sorted out and the bowl picture is complete, I have the distinct pleasure of writing about a sport where the regular season actually means something.

That's right, you heard me. College basketball's regular season is far more meaningful, far more compelling and far more important than college football's. That's because college basketball actually has a postseason tournament where the champion is decided not by pollsters and computers but by what happens on the court. Since more teams have a chance to win the championship, more games are worth watching in the months preceding it. The NCAA basketball tournament enhances, rather than diminishes, the value of the regular season.

I'm sure this shocks tattered souls like my friend Stewart Mandel and college football purists who argue that because the college football regular season is that sport's playoff, those games are compelling. College hoops, this thinking goes, doesn't really begin until the second week of March, so there's no sense paying attention to what is happening until then.

Well, let's do the math. We just finished one of the greatest college football weeks in years -- that SEC championship game was certainly appointment viewing in my house. Yet out of the 16 games played last week, only three had an impact on the national title chase. (And I'm being generous by including USC-UCLA. When a team wins and still has no shot at the big trophy, it's hard to call the game significant.) That left 14 games that meant absolutely nothing.

Two weeks ago, with a fuller national schedule, there were 41 games played in Division I-A football. At most, five of them mattered: Texas-Texas A&M, Alabama-Auburn, Florida-Florida State, USC-Notre Dame and Oklahoma-Oklahoma State. That's 36 worthless games, if you're scoring at home. This is a compelling regular season?

On the last Saturday in February, I'll bet there will be at least two dozen basketball games that will have a direct effect on which teams qualify for the NCAA tournament. Another 15 or so will have a major impact on seeds. Try telling the players and their fans that those games don't mean anything.

Now, I grant you that no college basketball regular season game will hold the nation rapt the way Florida and Alabama game did on Saturday, or the way those Texas-Texas Tech-Oklahoma matchups did. That was great, great stuff. But when Ohio State got blown out by USC on Sept. 13, that essentially eliminated the Buckeyes from the championship race. Whatever glimmer of hope remained was squelched by Penn State with four games still left to play. If the Ohio State-Michigan game is the biggest rivalry in college football, what exactly were those two teams playing for this year? Nothing.

Imagine if Ohio State needed to win that game to get into an eight-team playoff. Now that would mean something.

And don't even get me started on the bowls. There are 34 Bowl games in all, but only one is really worth watching (and we have to wait five dadgum weeks for that one). By contrast, there will be 63 games played in the NCAA basketball tournament, and every one of them is meaningful.

If we applied the logic of the college football purist to hoops, then UCLA should be eliminated from the national title hunt by virtue of the Bruins' loss to Michigan last month. Michigan State should likewise be out thanks to its upset loss to Maryland. Oh, and sorry, Louisville, you're gone too after tripping up against Western Kentucky. Those teams would still have three months' worth of regular season games to play, and not one of them would be worth watching.

Yes, there are about 12-15 teams who are basically assured of making the NCAA tournament, so they will spend the next three months getting better and angling for the best possible seed. That is far from a meaningless quest, but those games won't have the weight of Oklahoma versus Texas. Even so, there are well over 100 college basketball teams that are trying right now to build their cases for at-large bids. Many of these non-conference games being played in November and December will loom plenty large on Selection Sunday. These games matter a lot. To illustrate my point, I've listed below 10 teams that, for better or worse, have drastically altered their chances to make the NCAA tournament -- and conference play hasn't even started yet.

My point here is not to disparage college football. I love college football. When that sport is at its best, as it was Saturday afternoon, there is truly nothing like it. And I will happily concede that in the grand scheme of things, college football is much bigger than college basketball. But that's not because basketball has a playoff and football doesn't. It's because in America, football is king. Check out how the NBA stacks up to the NFL -- it's not even close.

The NFL, as you may have noticed, also has a postseason tournament. Last I looked, that didn't seem to fatally devalue the games that are played during the four months beforehand. College football is a wonderful, wonderful sport. It deserves a real postseason. It deserves a better regular season as well.