TERRY COLUMN: Bracketing through the motions

No teams will be eliminated from this weekend’s District 7B tournament.

The entire tournament is a formality, really.

The district tournament for the area’s Class B teams — Bigfork, Troy, Libby and Eureka all have teams entered — is mostly for show this weekend.

Four games will be played today between girls and boys teams in what is technically a double-elimination tournament.

The elimination part of the tournament took place earlier this week. Troy’s boys and girls dispatched of last place teams from Eureka and Thompson Falls to enter in the big bracket as fourth seeds.

The losers of today’s first round contests will still be in Kalispell next weekend for the Western B divisional tournament, but rather than being sent home, will just be relegated to playing the top teams from District 6B next week.

It’s the consequence of playing in the smallest district in the state.

District 7B only has five teams. They need to get down to four by the end of this weekend.

While there are much more complicated ways to eliminate one team, the simplest, and most direct is what the schools have chosen to do.

Let the bottom two teams fight it out.

Only one other district in the state has five teams, District 2B on the eastern Hi-Line. They play their play-in games today before jostling for seeding on the weekend.

The entire exercise brings up the question, is all this really necessary?

With the only games of consequence already out of the way, couldn’t the whole district tournament in the five-team leagues just be one elimination game?

It would make more sense, freeing up each school for a few more nonconference games earlier in the year.

It’s the basic set up already in place in Class AA, where after the top teams receive byes into the state tournament, the rest of the schools have to fight each other for the last few spots. That configuration rewards regular season excellence and still allows the bottom of the league to play its way into the next week.

As it is, teams are treading water, the five-team districts just biding time so the other, larger districts in the region can sort things out before the divisional tournament.

District 6B, in the west and southwest areas this side of the Divide, has a six-team format to sort out, which will require play-ins, a consolation bracket and a much more complicated situations, before heading to Kalispell next week for the Western divisional.

To a degree, the current configuration helps teams prepare for tournament-style play and practice. There is a difference, however slight, in playing every game on the road and in back-to-back, must-win situations.

Only this week, there are no must-win games. There are only should-win games.

End of the year tournaments should be more important than that.