DITCH THE TOURNAMENTS. MODIFY THE AUTOMATIC BID.

An ESPN columnist notes that an upset by an also-ran team in one of the so-called mid-major conferences leads to an automatic bid for a low-seeded one-and-done, and if the regular-season champion does not have a sufficiently solid body of work, it's either one of the lesser tournaments or an early start to the off-season.

It took Fresno State 87 days and 18 basketball games to prove it was the Mountain West's best team in the regular season. It took one game for the Mountain West to determine that Fresno State wasn't the team the conference would send to represent it in the NCAA tournament.

We can do better than that broken math. Conference tournaments can be a means for women's college basketball to innovate. They shouldn't be an instrument of punishment for mid-major teams that already struggle to compete on level terms with Power 5 peers.

The commentator's argument is incomplete, in that the power conferences are able to exploit an unintended consequence of Title Nine, and keep additional players on scholarship, compared with the men's squads. But the men's teams in some conferences have gone to a form of flexible scheduling in the latter part of their seasons with a view toward strengthening their stronger teams' performance ratings, in the hope that an oopsie in the tournament (on any given day and all that) will not be the end of post-season play for the presumptive favorite.

The commentator envisions a role for the tournament, though, in which the incentives are all wrong.

"All eight teams have the same allure, the same dream, of playing in the Big Dance," [South Dakota head coach Dawn] Plitzuweit told them of the Summit League tournament. "Every single player that's playing has that goal."

That is undeniably part of the allure of conference tournaments. The tension of win-or-go-home basketball is entertaining. A regular-season game in January can't replicate it.

"I think there's something that's really special and fun about [tournaments]," Plitzuweit continued. "I also think there's something very challenging about that as a mid-major."

But we already know that drama doesn't require the additional stakes of an NCAA tournament automatic bid. We see it all the time. If Stanford had upset Oregon on a buzzer-beater in the Pac-12 final, the crowd would have roared, the players would have danced and the title would forevermore have belonged to the Cardinal to display in the rafters and in record books.

And yet we would have already known both teams were NCAA tournament locks. A loss wouldn't even have cost the Ducks a No. 1 seed.

So let all conference tournaments stand on their own merit. Rebrand them as cup-style competitions, where conference teams compete for a prize separate from the regular season -- and separate from any NCAA tournament implications.

Perhaps the players and coaches will take the additional games seriously as a way to tune up, or perhaps it will be the college basketball equivalent of those "exhibition" football games in which the starters hold clipboards.  That's not something I claim to understand.  The economics, on the other hand: the concession that Stanford and Oregon are both in, irrespective of the tournament, simply recognizes that the other conferences are simply irrelevant window-dressing to make college athletics resemble some sort of open competition among amateurs, when the reality is that an alignment of the 64 top basketball schools into four big conferences is still likely; and outside of their tournaments, which could be used as ways to set the final four, the conference tournaments are not a financially appealing proposition.