When a discussion is held one can either try to arrived at shared meaning, or one can try to "win." I conceded that my third goal phrasing was incomplete rather than "doesn't make sense." Your response to that concession, along with your use of hyperbole and much of your other responses in both posts, indicate to me you are a "win" person. To the extent I might seem thin-skinned regarding hyperbole I assure you I don't take things people write on the Internet personally, but hyperbole is a pretty good indicator of a person's goal in the discussion. If I point it out and people refrain from further hyperbole, well, perhaps there's a chance at shared meaning. I normally don't care to further discussions with "win" folks because shared meaning is never the destination, to them discussions are automatically debates to be won or lost, but let's see where this last round goes.
I stated there are three goals. Let's truncate the third goal to "entertain" to avoid future discussion on that point. Your position is that there really is a fourth goal, to draft the best performing teams available after all the conference representation is completed. This is a goal independent from the first, to crown a champion, because we know from history that the champion is not going to come from what we might call the bubble teams. If a 7-9 conference team fails to win their conference tournament we know they don't have what it takes to be champion. Including them in the tournament rounds out the field of 64 with the leftover "best performing" teams that yet will never win the championship.
I will concede that is an existing fourth goal that I omitted. My point in emphasizing much fewer teams are needed to determine the eventual champion than are used indicates that this goal is unnecessary for the first goal, but my argument would have been made stronger, or perhaps clearer, if I acknowledged such a fourth goal in order to emphasize that it does little to enhance the other three. To attempt to make my argument perfectly clear I would then say that fourth goal should be replaced by a different one: for those remaining teams whose real function is to just "complete the field" rather than to "compete for a championship," such a privilege only will be bestowed on teams without losing records in or out of conferences, that a measure of success within one's respective conference, no more arbitrary than the measures used for overall performance, must be met in order to gain that privilege.
I take it you are in full support of the "fourth goal" as it now stands. I concede that is as it theoretically stands but I am in full support of the change. As others have pointed out we are only talking about, at best, a couple of teams each year affected by the difference. We also are talking about swapping a couple teams where neither would go ten for ten against the other in a head-to-head. In fact, one reason I'm for the change is I happen to think overall measures of performance are indeed more arbitrary than relative measures of success. If we disagree because you think "bubble teams" do stand a chance of fulfilling the first goal, competing for a championship, I would counter that the empirical evidence weighs heavily against you. If we disagree because you think the "privilege" of rounding out the field with bubble teams should be determined by overall measures of performance, rather than relative measures of success, those are both legitimate opinions to be held and there really is no debate to be won or lost.
