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Tom B.
10-06-2015, 11:57 AM
Just finished reading Al's latest article for the DBR, and this snippet caught my eye:


Clemson has had a few notable accomplishments. In 1939, the Tigers won an improbable Southern Conference championship. It was improbable because Clemson shouldn’t have been in the field. In every other season between 1932 and 1953, the Southern Conference limited its tournament field to the top eight teams in the league. For some reason I have not been able to discover, in 1939 the league experimented with an 11-team field. Clemson was one of the three extra teams. The Tigers – led by two-sport All-American Banks McFadden – upset North Carolina in the first round, then knocked off Wake Forest, Davidson and Maryland to win the title.

Like Al, I have no definitive knowledge as to why the SoCon used an 11-team tournament field in 1939. But I can speculate.

At the time (as Al pointed out), the SoCon took the top eight teams for its conference tournament. (Before 1932, the SoCon actually had a 16-team tournament, when the conference was a 23-school behemoth that included several of the modern-day SEC programs.) The problem was that the programs in the league played highly unbalanced schedules -- way more unbalanced than the current ACC. The 1938-39 SoCon -- like the current ACC -- was a 15-team league. And like the current ACC, there was no double round-robin. Unlike the current ACC, the member programs didn't even play the same number of conference games each season.

In the 1938-39 season, Wake Forest (the regular season "champion") played 18 conference games, finishing with a record of 15-3. The remaining league programs all played somewhere between 10 and 16 conference games. The final conference W/L records looked like this:



Team
Record


Wake Forest
15-3


Maryland
8-3


Washington & Lee
8-3


The Citadel
7-3


Davidson
9-7


North Carolina
8-7


N.C. State
7-6


Duke
8-8


Clemson
6-6


VMI
6-6


U. of Richmond
5-5


William & Mary
4-9


South Carolina
2-8


Virginia Tech
2-10


Furman
0-10




Right away, you see the problem if you're trying to pick the top eight teams. You've got seven teams above .500, then four teams at .500, but with different numbers of conference games and wins. Duke played 16 conference games, Clemson and VMI played 12, and Richmond played 10. So who gets the eighth spot?

It looks like the league decided that the fairest result was to let all four .500 teams into the conference tournament, and have an 11-team field. The top five teams -- Wake Forest, Maryland, Washington & Lee, Davidson, and The Citadel -- all got byes to the SoCon Tournament quarterfinals. The remaining six teams -- Clemson, UNC, Richmond, VMI, N.C. State, and Duke -- all played in the first round, with the winners advancing to the quarterfinals.

Like I said, I have no definitive information to confirm that this was the SoCon's rationale, but it seems to make sense. It gets a little weird, though, because the very next year, there was another tie for eighth place in the SoCon standings -- The Citadel and William & Mary both finished 6-5 in conference play. But rather than use a nine-team field for the conference tournament, the SoCon only took eight. The Citadel played in the SoCon Tournament, while William & Mary was left out. What makes it even stranger is the fact that William & Mary had the better overall record -- they were 12-11 overall, while the Citadel was 8-9. I don't have any information that would shed light on how the conference broke that tie or why they chose The Citadel over William & Mary, but that's what they did.

There was another tie for eighth place in the SoCon in 1948. It was a three-way tie, with Wake Forest, William & Mary, and South Carolina all finishing 8-7 in conference play. That year, the conference used a ten-team tournament field and let all three eighth-place teams play. The top six teams got byes to the quarterfinals, while the seventh-place team (Duke) and the three eighth-place teams had to play first round games.

RepoMan
10-06-2015, 01:32 PM
To me, the "negative" that bumps them to the bottom has to be the fact that they could not find room on their team for the sons of the best player in school history, Dell Curry. Failing to offer spots to Steph and Seth is stunning.

sagegrouse
10-06-2015, 01:51 PM
Just finished reading Al's latest article for the DBR, and this snippet caught my eye:



Like Al, I have no definitive knowledge as to why the SoCon used an 11-team tournament field in 1939. But I can speculate.

At the time (as Al pointed out), the SoCon took the top eight teams for its conference tournament. (Before 1932, the SoCon actually had a 16-team tournament, when the conference was a 23-school behemoth that included several of the modern-day SEC programs.) The problem was that the programs in the league played highly unbalanced schedules -- way more unbalanced than the current ACC. The 1938-39 SoCon -- like the current ACC -- was a 15-team league. And like the current ACC, there was no double round-robin. Unlike the current ACC, the member programs didn't even play the same number of conference games each season.

In the 1938-39 season, Wake Forest (the regular season "champion") played 18 conference games, finishing with a record of 15-3. The remaining league programs all played somewhere between 10 and 16 conference games. The final conference W/L records looked like this:



Team
Record


Wake Forest
15-3


Maryland
8-3


Washington & Lee
8-3


The Citadel
7-3


Davidson
9-7


North Carolina
8-7


N.C. State
7-6


Duke
8-8


Clemson
6-6


VMI
6-6


U. of Richmond
5-5


William & Mary
4-9


South Carolina
2-8


Virginia Tech
2-10


Furman
0-10




Right away, you see the problem if you're trying to pick the top eight teams. You've got seven teams above .500, then four teams at .500, but with different numbers of conference games and wins. Duke played 16 conference games, Clemson and VMI played 12, and Richmond played 10. So who gets the eighth spot?

It looks like the league decided that the fairest result was to let all four .500 teams into the conference tournament, and have an 11-team field. The top five teams -- Wake Forest, Maryland, Washington & Lee, Davidson, and The Citadel -- all got byes to the SoCon Tournament quarterfinals. The remaining six teams -- Clemson, UNC, Richmond, VMI, N.C. State, and Duke -- all played in the first round, with the winners advancing to the quarterfinals.

Like I said, I have no definitive information to confirm that this was the SoCon's rationale, but it seems to make sense. It gets a little weird, though, because the very next year, there was another tie for eighth place in the SoCon standings -- The Citadel and William & Mary both finished 6-5 in conference play. But rather than use a nine-team field for the conference tournament, the SoCon only took eight. The Citadel played in the SoCon Tournament, while William & Mary was left out. What makes it even stranger is the fact that William & Mary had the better overall record -- they were 12-11 overall, while the Citadel was 8-9. I don't have any information that would shed light on how the conference broke that tie or why they chose The Citadel over William & Mary, but that's what they did.

There was another tie for eighth place in the SoCon in 1948. It was a three-way tie, with Wake Forest, William & Mary, and South Carolina all finishing 8-7 in conference play. That year, the conference used a ten-team tournament field and let all three eighth-place teams play. The top six teams got byes to the quarterfinals, while the seventh-place team (Duke) and the three eighth-place teams had to play first round games.

I do have a recollection. In one of the Duke books I read a while ago, Eddie Cameron, the Duke AD at the time, is given credit for standing up for the smaller schools. The Citadel, in this case, had a really good conference record but didn't play any of Duke, UNC, Wake or State. Some of the larger schools wanted to exclude it from the SoCon tournament. The four-way tie hypothesis is probably the right answer, but there was clearly a "class system" in the SoCon that foreshadowed the creation of the ACC. WRT the following year -- heck -- there may have been a coin toss involved, or maybe Bill and Mary didn't want to play.

BlueTeuf
10-07-2015, 07:04 PM
The Citadel played in the SoCon Tournament, while William & Mary was left out. What makes it even stranger is the fact that William & Mary had the better overall record -- they were 12-11 overall, while the Citadel was 8-9. I don't have any information that would shed light on how the conference broke that tie or why they chose The Citadel over William & Mary, but that's what they did.

On January 27, 1940 the Citadel beat William & Mary 36-35 which likely explains the tournament selection decision.

I'll confess to having missed that tussle.

-BlueTeuf

sagegrouse
10-07-2015, 07:09 PM
On January 27, 1940 the Citadel beat William & Mary 36-35 which likely explains the tournament selection decision.

I'll confess to having missed that tussle.

-BlueTeuf

My Dad was probably there, if it was in Charleston, as he was a Citadel cadet at the time.

BlueTeuf
10-07-2015, 08:01 PM
My Dad was probably there, if it was in Charleston, as he was a Citadel cadet at the time.

That's pretty cool. According to this link, it was indeed at home. http://static.psbin.com/w/l/paq5hqsyxqnd14/All-Time_Records_vs._Opponents.pdf Was also their first meeting ever, which now seem to number in the 50s or 60s.

Olympic Fan
10-07-2015, 09:23 PM
Just to be clear, Tom B.'s suggestion appears to make sense -- except there were quite a few years in the 1933-53 era when there were ties and teams were still left out.

Tom is right that the unbalanced schedules were a nightmare -- they ruled that teams must play a minimum of 10 conference games to qualify, but several teams each year failed to reach that limit and others did it by avoiding all the good teams in the league.

Eddie Cameron played a key role -- he was the chairman of the Southern Conference basketball committee (at least from 1938 until Duke left the league in 1953 and he became chairman of the ACC basketball committee until his retirement in 1972). It was the committee which selected the eight teams that would play in the tourney each year. He didn't have sole say, but he was the most powerful man in Southern Conference basketball.

I know that The Citadel controversy occurred in 1938. The Citadel was 10-1 in Southern Conference play, but the 10 wins were against the four worst teams in the league (VMI, Furman, South Carolina and Clemson). They played one game against powerful North Carolina schools, losing to Wake Forest -- which finished 8-7 (playing two games each against the powers Duke, UNC, NC State and Davidson) and DIDN'T make the Tournament that year. There was no question that Wake Forest was a stronger team that year, but Cameron insisted that the committee take the best records and not try to impose its opinion as to the strength of the various teams. I don't know that I'd call that "standing up for the little guy" -- that would be like the NCAA Selection committee giving an at large berth to a 24-3 Elon team (that lost its only game to an ACC opponent) over a 21-10 NC State team which was 9-7 in the ACC. It certainly encouraged teams to duck tough league opponents -- both Furman in the Selvy years and West Virginia, which joined the league later, took advantage of that policy to schedule the weakest lineup they could manage.

There were all kinds of proposals to address the problem. In 1953, Everett Case introduced a convoluted scheme that would measure schedules based on the previous year's standings. Before it could be adopted, the seven strongest Southern Conference athletic programs broke off to form the ACC -- which became an eight-team league (with the later addition of independent Virginia) and solved all the problems.

PS While the original Southern Conference -- which included the modern SEC and most of the modern ACC -- did limit the field to the top 16 teams in the late '20s and early '30s, it originally had no limits. Any team that wanted to participate could -- the 1922 Southern Conference Tournament included 25 teams! Actually, for a few years, the tournament wasn't even restricted to the Southern Conference -- any Southern team, conference member or not, could compete. That's led to the problem of identifying the first Southern Conference champion.

It wasn't 1921, when Kentucky won the first tournament in Atlanta. The Southern Conference (which was formed that same week in Atlanta) had nothing to do with it. The new conference did take over management of the tournament from the Atlanta Athletic Club in 1922, but the tournament remained open to all comers. Was UNC, which beat non-Southern Conference member Mercer in the finals in 1922, the first Southern Conference champion? Was it Mississippi A&M (now Miss State) that beat non-member Chattanooga in 1923? Or was it UNC again in 1924 -- the first year only Southern Conference teams could participate? Kentucky, UNC and Mississippi State all claim the first Southern Conference championship.