IT'S NOT BROKEN; DON'T FIX IT: I am flummoxed as to why -- other than greed for more tv dollars -- anyone would support expanding the NCAA Division I men's basketball championship from 65 teams to 96.
There's simply no competitive justification -- every team that demonstrates during the regular season any possible claim to being the best team in the nation has no problem gaining entry into the field. Disputes over worthy "bubble teams" almost never concern teams which could reach the Final Four (#11 George Mason, a 2006 at-large bid), let alone have a legitimate claim to championship-seeking. This will only further reduce the importance of both the regular season and the conference tournaments, and, really: are you excited about two days of games featuring matchups of the 33rd and 96th best teams in the country, or between 15th and 18th-seeded teams? Is America yearning to see mediocre big-conference teams face off against decent mid-majors lacking pedigree?
The tournament is entertaining because some #2-#4 seeds are vulnerable to some seeded #13-#15 in the opening two days, and yes those games will still happen a round later. But do we really care if an 11 seed is "knocked off" by a team seeded 22nd?
Leave it to the NCAA to fix the post-season that ain't broke, but not the one that is.
ReplyDeleteI wish the NCAA would actually do this, since my entire enjoyment of basketball, professional or college, comes from the five minutes each March it takes for me to fill out the brackets.
ReplyDeleteI'm old enough to remember when the tournament was 16 teams - to get in, you had to win your conference. That's it. Maybe a couple of at large independents got in. This made the regular season (there were no "conference tournaments") critical and the sport was much better. 96 teams will make the regular season unimportant (kind of like NBA and NHL)
ReplyDeleteThere's already a place you can see the 65th through 96th best teams compete in the post-season. It's called the NIT.
ReplyDeleteSadly, I think is inevitable. The NCAA is so successful because it's so balanced between depth of talent, "Cinderella potential", while still having great competition in the early rounds. They're making buckets of cash so they're going to try and make more. I agree with gtv that the regular season/conference tournaments are going to be increasingly pointless. And what does happen to the NIT? Just cancel it?
ReplyDeleteI'm terribly depressed by this. I work in a college atheltic dept and serve on an NCAA committee, and one of the things that has most depressed me about this is the process. Most NCAA decisions are really made by surveying the membership and having the schools/conferences vote on the matter. This has been pushed through by the NCAA staff, with no opportunity for input by the member schools, many of whom agree it's a bad idea but will be stuck with the result, hoping like everyone else that it works out for the best. I hope it works out, but color me skeptical.
ReplyDeleteIf you're going to move to 96 teams, why not just let everyone in?
ReplyDeleteI'm with girard. Do this in combination with eliminating the increasingly pointless conference tournaments. In soccer tournaments like the FA Cup, EVERYONE is in, it's just that there are multiple staggered byes with the Premier League clubs that are also playing in Europe joining in about the 9th round overall. THEORETICALLY, the worst team in English football could make it through the 12 rounds to make the final four.
ReplyDeleteFor the NCAA, the math would work perfectly on a 256 team field. The worst 128 play in the first round Monday or Tuesday. The winners meet the next tier of 64, who received a one game bye, Thursday or Friday. The winning 64 play one more round on Saturday and Sunday to get to 32. 160 teams have been eliminated, 32 have survived and 64 haven't played yet. The 32 survivors play the next tier of 32 teams Tuesday or Wednesday to get to your field of 64. Tournament then proceeds as usual.
<span><span><span>Also, no seeding other than tier placement until we get to the final 64. Regional travel concerns will trump actual seeding to cut back on travel expense. The first three rounds will be played at the schools' courts. Four sub regionals of 48 teams could then be set up with random draw for the 32 first round teams in each regional's match ups and home courts. The draw for the second round would be made along with the first so that the 64 first round winners would know where they would be traveling in case they won. </span>
ReplyDeleteIf I could only figure out how to set the host teams for the third round with only a two day turnaround, I'd be set.</span></span>
Completely agree that it should be 64, no more than that (and I include the dumb play-in game). We'll agree to disagree on whether under the current system everybody with a legitimate claim on getting in gets in. This isn't Idol, where ordering contestants into tiers and not sweating the intra-tier order is all that matters. The tournament itself is more important than the winner, and I enjoy the first four days far more than anything that follows. It is important to make sure that the right teams make the field of 65. That's not to suggest that I think there should be changes to the selection process -- I don't, except maybe that they should not allow anyone on the selection committee who refuses to be as dedicated a follower of West Coast basketball as East Coast/midwest. I just think that it's wrong to believe that we shouldn't sweat the hard decisions with a field of 64 or 65.
ReplyDeleteFair enough, insofar as a "championship tournament" probably needs only 12-16 teams to legitimately name a champion, and extra games beyond that aren't a physical burden in the same way they would be in a football playoff.
ReplyDeleteThe first four days are the best, and I do wiish it was weighted more towards mid-majors than failed big conference teams in the bubble selection .. but I'd rather they get those calls right than add 32 more teams to ensure no 17-12 team is left behind.
Oh holy god. Although I am a sports fan pretty much across the board, I can't tolerate basketball. It makes me crazy. I hate this time of the year because my birthday gets subsumed into March Madness. I may have to leave my own home if this tournament goes to 96.
ReplyDeleteSee also Goose, Golden
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure that's the right dichotomy. If Washington lost to Cal instead of winning in the Pac-10 title game, it probably would have been out of the tournament on basically the same principle you're espousing -- that (at least on the West Coast) the mid-majors were better than the failed big conference teams. Then Washington went out and won two games -- completely dominating the #3 seed mid-major. You couldn't say ex ante whether Washington deserved to make it over, say, an East Coast mid-major, and had Washington not won its way in, everybody would have forgotten about it by now. My point is only that I'd want that decision made by someone who actually watched Washington and whoever else was on the bubble play, rather than somebody who saw a couple of games of the East Coast mid-major under consideration and then read a newspaper article that said that the Pac-10 was having a bad year.
ReplyDeleteBasically, I'm saying that staying up past 11:00 and having a satellite dish should be requirements for selection committee members who live on the East Coast.
Oh, sure. But the fact that Washington *did* win two games doesn't mean that there weren't also 10 teams left out of the field which could have won those two games if each had 10 chances to do so. Washington happened to get in, and happened to win in this iteration.
ReplyDeleteThe Onion: http://www.theonion.com/video/ncaa-expands-march-madness-to-include-4096-teams,14317/
ReplyDeleteThe NCAA purchased the NIT back in 2005. Last line of the press release: Finals of the tournaments will continue to be held in the New York City area for at least the next five years.
ReplyDeleteFive years are up, NCAA no longer needs to pretend they care about carrying two tournaments.
Which is why I say we need people to evaluate teams based on the same criteria (meaning not someone who feels like he has a great grasp of East Coast teams from watching them every night but relies on stats and indexes for West Coast teams. All I can ask for is a fair process.
ReplyDeleteThe corollary to my hypothesis that if Washington lost to Cal and didn't make the tournament everybody would have forgotten about it by now is that everybody also has to forget about the supposed 10 other teams that didn't make the tournament. Washington actually disproved the notion that it didn't belong in the tournament; none of the 10 who missed it did.
Close parens!
ReplyDeleteI suspect Girard was being sarcastic, but if not, I adopt his comment verbatim, but with sarcasm.
ReplyDeleteDon't the kids in the 53-98 teams deserve a shot? For most college athletes, just making it to that stage is an accomplishment, and the kind of experience many would kill for. In fact, you argue the best point of all - it probably won't affect much of anything. Most of those teams will get eliminated. Maybe a few get hot, go on a tear and who knows? But the players deserve the opportunity.
ReplyDeleteHa! You don't have the secret password to edit comments!
ReplyDeleteDoes a team have to win a game to prove it belongs in the tournament? Say an at-large 11 seed loses; well, it was supposed to lose. Doesn't mean it wasn't more worthy of that slot than some other school.
I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "deserver". If the point is that every college basketball player deserves to play in the tournament (which I could maybe get behind ala the FA Cup model), then every team should be in it. But then simply being in the tournament is no longer much of an accomplishment. Otherwise, I'm not sure why a player on the 96th team deserves it any more than a player on the 97th team.
ReplyDeleteAt the point, we're just drawing fairly arbitrary lines (as the NCAA did with 64), in which case there probably ought to be a better argument for changing something that currently works quite well.
I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "deserver". If the point is that every college basketball player deserves to play in the tournament (which I could maybe get behind ala the FA Cup model), then every team should be in it. But then simply being in the tournament is no longer much of an accomplishment. Otherwise, I'm not sure why a player on the 96th team deserves it any more than a player on the 97th team.
ReplyDeleteAt the point, we're just drawing fairly arbitrary lines (as the NCAA did with 64), in which case there probably ought to be a better argument for changing something that currently works quite well.
Hell, why not let the final four teams from the Div III tournament in?
ReplyDeleteI believe that they do have a shot; they have the chance to win their conference tourney, and prove their worth. That's how a lot of these 15 and 16 teams get in anyway. Other than the Ivy, I don't think any conferences don't hold a tourney.
ReplyDeleteThe NIT likely would bite the dust under this proposal. During its telecast of the NIT final last night, ESPN repeatedly pointed out how this might be the last NIT championship game ever.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't being sarcastic. In Michigan, every high school is in the post season tournament, and every so often an unexpected team makes a run, and it's kind of exciting. I was on a team like that in 1977. We were barely .500 and we knocked off two top 10 teams in the districts and went to the elite 8 before losing by two.
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