Leave My Madness Alone!

Most times when faced with a big decision it’s best to do so without emotion. But in this case, I recommend making up your mind right now. We just watched perhaps the greatest first weekend in NCAA Tournament history. And yet, for some reason there is big push to make a major change to the tournament.

Here’s why it’s stupid:

1) The tournament is perfect the way it is. I know that sounds like when your parents told you “because I said so,” but it’s an important point. We’ve finally found something that everyone agrees is great and we want to change it, for what?

a) For the deserving teams that get left out. Partially true, but that’s the beauty of it. Good teams should get left out. That’s what makes it worth fighting for. If only bad teams were left out, it wouldn’t be as special. Looking very carefully at the bubble this year, every single team that missed the tournament had at least a couple losses that makes me not feel sorry for their exclusion.

b) For the money. I haven’t heard anyone official say this, but people assume this is the reason. I cannot see anyway an extra round will make more money. You would have more teams traveling to more places and no one (you hear me, no one) will go to these games. Did you see the crowds at the first round games? Empty. Who would go see the 96th best team in the country? And CBS likely won’t pay one red cent more to broadcast games no one wants to see. And ESPN? That’s possible but if the contract went to ESPN it would likely be for a lot less, and it might come at the expense of the women’s tournament. I just don’t see a big financial reward from this, it could even be a loss (though it would kill the existing money-losing tournaments the NIT and CBI).

c) For the keeeeeds. College presidents will say another 300 or so young people will get the chance to get the experience to play in the NCAA Tournament. You can’t really argue with that one the most you can say is the NC-Double-Assholes are being disingenuous.

d) For the mid-majors. Yes, 31 extra teams would definitely add a lot more teams from the mid-majors, and even a few of those smaller conferences whose regular season winners lose in their conference tournaments will get two bids. But mostly those bids will continue to fatten up the power conferences. Every .500 team from a power conference gets into the NIT, that will continue to happen if 96 teams make it.

e) For the coaches. This could be the real reason. A lower bar for getting into the tournament means more bids and coaches keeping their jobs longer.

f) For history. I've actually heard people argue that because there have been several expansions to the tournament all of which were harshly criticized then roundly accepted as positive. Someone needs to read about the law of diminishing returns. Adding more teams at this point (at least 31 of them, I could live with 3) would not only make the new games meaningless it would hurt interest and excitement for once we got down to 64. And would it mean that in 2040 or thereabouts we'd have to expand to 128 and 30 years after that to 256?

2) The games wouldn’t be any good. I know they don’t consider the fans but look at it this way, the 64-65 matchup that nobody pays attention to now would be the featured matchup under this new format. Though as mentioned above, those teams would be bumped to 95 and 96 and two mediocre big conference teams like Cincinnati and Arizona State would get those spots.

3) It’s a logistical nightmare. Would these 31 new games all take place on Tuesday and Wednesday? Where? 32 games at 4 sites would have to be four per day. A logistical nightmare unless they extend the tournament an entire week, which they will never do, so they could start it earlier and get rid of conference tournaments, which is unlikely because those do make money, because they're meaningful. At least they were meaningful until everyone got in.

4) Brackets will be ruined. Forget the prurient gambling, the NCAA shouldn't worry about that. But they should be interested in keeping this great tradition alive because it builds interest in the tournament. And there's nothing wrong with that. And there's no way pools will be as good with 96 teams, one day to fill them out and how will that even fit on one piece of paper?

5) The regular season will be meaningless. The conference tournaments have done a great job of this but this would finish the job. Teams would have absolutely no reason to schedule anyone difficult out-of-conference. Look at it this way, you can play 10 cupcakes, 2 decent teams, finish 10-2 then enter conference play and go 6-10 (7-11 in Big East) and not even have to sweat it out on Selection Sunday.

But the most important reason is number 1: it's perfect the way it is.