Tourney thoughts

Good feedback to the future of the NEC Tourney talk. A few comments of my own.

1) Blue, there's no way in the world any conference would ever have rotating divisions. First off, you never build rivalries that way. Second, you'd never get the teams to agree to be relegated to a lower division. There's a reason no one does it that way.

2) You can't play a tourney like the NEC's at a neutral site. You just can't. I know some leagues do it, but they're nuts. Forget the fact that it ruins the regular season, which should be the most important thing considered when determining a conference tourney format. Look in the stands in leagues where they do.
Look at the Big Sky... two teams playing on someone else's home court, and there was no one there. Heck, I'm watching an ACC Tournament game being played in front of a crowd that would make Quinnipiac upset.
The same thing would happen to the NEC. If you played the whole thing before the final at RMU this year, there would have been 11 people at the SHU-Mount game. It's bad for the league, it makes no money, and it's unfair to the team who fought the whole year to earn a higher seed. Ask the CCSU women if they'd have rather played the semifinal at home in front of some students or at SHU in front of a handful of people.
And because you need to play a small league at home sites, you can't have more than eight teams in it. You can't ask a team to play on the road one night and then somewhere else 2 days later, then somewhere else two days after that.
For those who want to do a first round (four byes into the quarters is the easiest way to do it), let me ask you this: When are you playing those games?
Under that format using this year's standings, CCSU would have played Saturday at Quinny in the season finale, then home for the 11-seed on Tuesday, then at SHU on Thursday. Big conferences that draw people can ask teams to play four straight days because they go no further than the hotel, which is set up for them close by. You're asking Central to not only play three games in six days, but to play in THREE DIFFERENT CITIES IN SIX DAYS. And that's assuming they don't make the semis.

3) You're all missing the big key to both the divisions and why you can't have CCSU play that tourney schedule I just described: Money. This isn't the Big East with chartered planes. The reason CCSU wouldn't want that schedule is the travel. It's a strain competitively and financially. You're asking them to do to much. Also, remember they're supposed to be doing schoolwork in there, too.

Which is why the divisions work the way I did them. Why would SFNY agree to it, a commenter just asked me? Because they keep their big rival (which I was careful to do for each team in the league) and only have to make the PA trip every other year, and the Mount trip every other year.
Speaking of rivalries: Football rivalries don't carry over to hoops in many cases, and neither does the "who's good now" theory. Students get more amped for a Quinny game than a RMU game, records be damned.

4) The "it's easier the old way" argument is wrong for two reasons. First, you'd have much more control over your playoff fate this way. You'd only have to beat two teams in your division and you'd be guaranteed to play the teams your chasing twice. Also, division record would be the tiebreaker, and you'd know before the year who you had to beat instead of wondering who the first-place team is going to be and hoping after the year that you happened to have beaten them.
And that, my friends, is why they need to keep the playoffs at eight, and why they should do two divisions.