Men’s and women’s soccer teams play on the same pitch, tennis plays on the same court and basketball on the same slab of hardwood. Call me crazy, but if there were a professional women’s football league – here’s looking to you, Vince McMahon -I’m pretty sure they’d be using a ball made of pigskin.

In a world where the sports culture is geared toward men’s and women’s sports being as close to mirror images of each other as possible, wouldn’t it make sense to have the men and women take part in a postseason that uses the same structure?

If you’re the Mid-American Conference, then your answer is simply “no” when discussing the realm of MAC basketball.

Let me explain just what I’m talking about. The MAC tournament for both men’s and women’s basketball seem to be pretty similar. Both give four teams a first-round bye and include every team in the conference. There is one fundamental difference, however, in that the men’s tournament awards the first-round byes to the top four teams in the conference regardless of divisional alignment.

The women’s byes are given to the top two teams in each division. If this doesn’t seem like a big deal, ask yourself a question: is it really fair for a second-place team in the MAC East with an 8-8 conference record to get a bye over a third-place MAC West team who went 10-6?

That’s exactly what happened to the women last week. Kent State got a bye in the first round of the tournament with an 8-8 conference record whereas NIU found itself playing at 10-6. Injustice, I am screaming your name.

It would be different if there were a viable reason for divisional alignment to play a role in seeding, but there isn’t. It’s not as though travel times would be a concern for a tournament played entirely in one building. Are you trying to tell me that the long trek from the locker room doors to the court is exhausting to these Division I athletes, MAC? I’m sorry to say I’d have to disagree with you.

“If you would do our bracket like you would do the men, or do our overall standings like the men do, we would finish fourth, and to tell you the truth, that bye would have really helped us,” said Carol Owens, NIU women’s head coach. “On the men’s side, they’ve got one through four, the top teams in the conference get the byes where we split it.”

It’s true that if the women’s tournament were set up the same as the men’s, then NIU would have gotten a bye and possibly avoided their first-round exit, but don’t get it twisted. I’m not trying to make excuses for this team. I don’t believe anybody will argue the fact that they blew it, plain and simple, against a Buffalo team they should have beaten. Keep in mind, though, that NIU finished out its regular season on the road against eventual tournament champion Ball State and a Western Michigan team that it hadn’t beaten away from DeKalb since before I was born.

Now I ask you, if this team has a better conference record than a team with a bye, why should they be forced to play in a one-and-done atmosphere on a normal turnaround period simply because they play in a better division?

Moreover, why is there a discrepancy between the two tournaments? From where I’m standing, I would think that the only difference should be the gender of the players. Is there some inherent correlation between gender and divisional play that I was not made aware of? Say it ain’t so, MAC, because the pieces just don’t match up.

Maybe new MAC Commissioner Jon Steinbrecher will address this because it is a problem.

The last time I checked, problems usually don’t go away until they’re fixed.