No postseason is perfect, but try explaining March Madness to an alien: the NCAA Champion is the team that wins six games in a row (seven for VCU). That's it.The problem is that I don't know any way to fix this without shrinking the tournament to 48 teams (or fewer), the idea being to give at least some subset of elite teams a first-round bye. But we know the NCAA isn't foregoing the revenue from those games, so that's a non-starter. The real problem is deeper, and it's structural.
The regular season is, in essence, meaningless beyond giving the high seeds an easier path. (And that doesn't always work out either, as VCU got in with wins over fellow low seed FSU, as well as mercurial Georgetown and Purdue — a path that any team would gladly have.) All of the 68 teams start over in March, even ones that might have struggled in the regular season. Like, say, losing five out of their last seven, and drawing the scorn of Vitale, Bilas and Lunardi on national TV. VCU's a hot team, but one of the best four teams of 2010-11?
It's sacrilege to say, but in point of fact, college football does a better job than college basketball of crowning the best team in the sport. You can't slip up, not at any time. That old BCS talking point is actually true: the regular season matters.
So long as players continue to leave elite programs after one year, then any advantage these schools have based on their ability to recruit the best players is neutralized and well-coached teams dominated by upperclassmen like VCU and Butler have a better chance. I miss the college basketball from when I was growing up, when you'd see players like Patrick Ewing stick around for four years -- the players became more familiar, and the game overall was played better. (Seriously, it's depressing watching all of these end-of-game sets which are "point guard dribbles around until there's five second to go, then fires a lousy three.")
At the same time, I don't like the idea of restricting the ability of adults to earn a living -- and eighteen-year-olds are adults. The idea that we force them into an academic environment in which some have no interest whatsoever because that's the most viable pre-professional path is nutty; maybe Brandon Jennings was onto something, or at least the D-League needs to be a financially viable option for high school graduates with no interest in college.
So, yes, two competing ideals in tension: what's best for college basketball is to have elite players choose to stay in college for four years, but from a rights/legal/moral perspective I'd like them to be free to not attend college at all. Which leads to one inexorable conclusion: the best way for schools to provide incentives for players to stay for four years is to surrender the myth of amateurism and allow college athletes to be compensated for all the revenue they're generating. Everyone gets rich off big time college sports except for the athletes who compete in them.
This has now gotten seriously longer than I had intended. Bottom line: if you think the past few years represent a problem, we don't have to change the tournament itself; we have to change something much larger.
