Just take a minute — or rather a moment.
And I promise I will keep this brief because I genuinely do not know how I feel about it. But it sure as hell is fascinating.
Feast your eyes and every brain cell that you have on the Big Ten Baseball Tournament and its wild format.
It is unlike anything else I have ever seen.
It is beautiful and ugly and understandable and incomprehensible all at the same time.
Over the years, there have been tournaments, and those tournaments have formats, and some of them make sense. There are play-in games. There are two-loss elimination brackets. There is even the vastly superior Page system.
Then there is whatever the Big Ten decided to come up with for this week’s conference baseball tournament in Omaha.
There are 12 teams, divided into four pools. Everyone in the pool plays each other, and the goal is to win both of your games. If two — or even three — teams finish 1-1 in the pool, the highest-seeded team moves on to the weekend. Pool winners are then divided into a traditional four-team bracket.
It’s all logically there. It all makes sense. It all checks out. Yet it’s insane. It’s glorious. It’s a work of art the likes we haven’t seen since the days of the Sun Belt’s basketball tournament.
What’s astounding is that the idea for this format had to have entered someone’s brain at some point. A mad scientist had to have thought it up with enough gumption to create a PowerPoint, to present it to people, to plead for it to be used and to believe it would be approved.
And it was. And here we are.
The hoops, the hurdles and the discussions that this idea had to overcome are nothing short of impressive — just as impressive as its uniqueness and creativity.
In sum, it borders on the line between miraculous and madness.
For now, though, soak it in. Enjoy it. Embrace it. Hate it. Debate it. Maybe we will see it again. Maybe we won’t.
But just give it a minute of your time, please.
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