Leave the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament Alone

The current edition is so nearly perfect that it defies all logic to the contrary. There are 32 Division 1 basketball conferences in the U.S. Each conference gets one automatic bid to the tournament. Thus, in the plainest sense, egalitarianism is exemplified in the tournament: every small conference gets a ticket, just like every big conference.

Then there are the at-large bids. Should a team fail to win their conference, the selection committee meets and gives 32 at-large bids. Once again, the regular season is upheld. If a team wins 20 or more games but stumbles in their conference tournament, there's still a pretty good chance that they'll make the 64-team field. Yes, the bigger conferences seem to get a bigger piece of the tournament pie than the smaller conferences do, but there are competitive and economically logical reasons for this. An advertiser will pay a lot more to broadcast a Duke game in San Diego than a Northeast Louisiana State game anywhere but northeastern Louisiana.

Finally, there is the crystalline perfection of a 64-team tournament. Everyone plays the same number of games. There are no byes, no excuses. As the late Jim Valvano said, to win, all a team has to do is survive and advance. The emotion is genuine. The thrills are unscripted and plentiful. There is always a thriller with a buzzer-beater. There is always an upset in the first and second rounds. The eventual champion will have played and won six consecutive games against the best teams in the nation, meaning that there are no upset champions.

Take all that, expand it to 96 teams, and one ends up with the mess that is college football.

For example, the benighted Bowl Championship Series designates an additional class of conferences among Division 1 conferences. Should some interloper from some vagabond conference up near Canada start making waves, voila! They tweak the rules, write one more line of code into their ranking computers, and Boise State finds itself in the back of the line again, perfect season notwithstanding. It sez so right here that there will never come a day when an Alabama or Florida team should sully itself by being on the same field with an undefeated TCU, not while the BCS polls and computers are specifically designed to keep that from ever happening.

In the men's basketball tournament, there is respect for schools that aren't members of the Big East or ACC. The rise of the mid-major bracket buster, led by teams like Gonzaga and conferences like the Missouri Valley Conference, coupled with the exodus of NBA-caliber talent after a season or so of service, has focused attention on those mid-level schools full of juniors and seniors that always seem to force their way into the Sweet 16 every year. Northeast Louisiana State might not exactly roll off the tongue, but let them get a winnable 12-5 matchup in the first round and they are the nation's darlings by the second week of the tournament. Duke could very well find itself facing a game Northern Iowa in the middle of the tournament, and woe be unto them if they overlook them.

Moreover, as I pointed out in an earlier article, there are 34 bowl games from around the second week of December to the first week of January. The sheer number of bowl games has not diluted not only the point of a bowl game, but also the caliber of opponent as well. In a 12-game season, if a team wins but five or six games, that team has a chance to play in something like the Chick-Fil-A Bowl, instead of rightly heading into the offseason embarrassed at having finished at or under .500.

Expand the Big Dance to 96 teams, and the 20-win season becomes meaningless. Thirteen wins and you're in, period.

If the tournament were 96 teams right now, every team save one in the ACC would get in, including North Carolina. Normally, schools like UNC are like legacy picks for the Big Dance, but does a team that is 10th out of 12 and 2-6 in conference deserve to play for the national championship?

Better yet, what would the possible ratings be for a 1-24 matchup?

If we were at 96 teams today, that looks a lot like Kansas playing San Jose State in the first round. Forget trying to advertise that game; forget even trying to sell tickets to that bloodletting. No one is going to pay green, folding cash to watch the Jayhawks run layup drills around San Jose State for 40 minutes of an outcome written in granite.

Where the basketball tournament achieves moral superiority over the alleged football tournament comes right back to that basic element of egalitarianism. No one is really saying that Kent State could win the whole thing. But no one is keeping Kent State out. Kent State gets the same chance that Michigan State does, perhaps even against Michigan State. Maybe they get blown out. Maybe they force the Spartans into a couple of overtimes before their Cinderella pass expires. The point is that it is fair. Kent State has their opponent on the court for 40 minutes. Their fate is in their own hands.

However, Kent State will have earned their shot by beating the other teams in their conference and posting an overall record that speaks more to dominance than to mediocrity. As much as the equality, it is also the quality of the competition that defines the NCAA tournament. The only way a bad team sneaks in is to win its conference tournament, and that doesn't happen often enough to argue against conference tourneys. Occasionally, a 20-win team doesn't make it...but never will a team with a genuine shot at winning the whole thing get left out.

Someone might argue that Boise State would never have beaten Alabama, to which I respond "I guess we'll never know."

The good news is that I am not alone in crying out against this nonsense. Sportswriters and fans across the nation have taken up the call to leave the tournament alone. One can hope that we can persuade the poobahs at the NCAA by sheer dint of effort and noise.

However, should the unthinkable come to pass and the only tournament worth watching gets destroyed by greed, it will only demonstrate one thing: that the guys who make this happen are suffering from a terminal case of rectal/cranial inversion.