96? Madness Finally Meets Reality...

I'm not sure where I was when I first heard the news but I sure as hell can tell you what my reaction was.

Please Lord, not again.

In the annals of all things American, there are countless examples of excess gone awry.  The bastion of these examples was just laid to rest last week when the Hummer finally called it quits after tormenting wallets and the environment (not to mention giving individuals a false sense of "bigness") for 18 years.  I could go to Enron, Lehman Brothers, the Super Size It, Krispy Kreme, my love of beer and Latrell Sprewell but brevity has to be the better part of valor here.

At first blush, adding 31 teams to the NCAA tournament has to reek of excess, right?

To do this justice, let's strip each side of their obvious argument and see what's left.

The chief argument for the NCAA is money.  The NCAA is in the eighth year of an 11-year, $6 billion contract with CBS but they have an opt out clause for the last three years which needs to be exercised by July 31st.  However, in this down economy, CBS might not get the money they got from the previous contract unless they sweeten the pot.  Complicating things further is that over 1/3 of their current contract is due to them in those last three years.  There is a four-letter neighbor on the cable side that is just licking its chops at the thought of getting its hands on the Madness and putting it on their gaggle of networks (which incidentally includes major network rival of CBS, ABC).  Thus, the change in format.  More games coupled with better distribution of the product equals even more obscene amounts of money.
The chief argument on the other side?  It boils down to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."  64 is a "perfect" number (and of course, the NCAA even screws that up with the 65th team in the unwatchable play-in game).  Three weeks is a "perfect" length for the tournament.  What about all those bracket pools?  (Do you realize how much work it is to expand my Excel spreadsheet?)  And seriously, would that weekend in Vegas be as fun if there were 32 games earlier in the week or the weekend before?  (I would argue yes but this isn't my argument).  Why would you change something that has been so successful for so long?

So what does that leave us with?  Here they are in the order of relevance (in my opinion)--

What happens to the NIT?
My sarcastic side says "Who Cares"?  Once I get past that (and trust me, it takes all my strength and energy to do so) my contemplative side says your looking at collateral damage.  The NCAA owns the NIT as a result of an antitrust lawsuit in 2002 (oh, the irony) and the NIT is in the last year of their contract with ESPN.  Taking teams 97-128 instead of 66-97 will not improve the NIT's already diminished stature--unless the NCAA decides to turn it into a mid-major festival to appease the lesser conferences who will obviously not benefit from the 31 additional teams.

What happens to the conference tournaments?
The conference tournaments are already as meaningless as the NIT--if it wasn't for the automatic bid that goes to the winner, I would have listed this first.  But the potential that a non-tournament team could qualify for a bid adds drama to them, even if it is only mid-major drama.  With the exception of Georgia who won the 2008 SEC tournament with their bottom seed and 4-12 conference record, major conference tournaments usually don't result in placing an automatic bid with a team that wouldn't have qualified otherwise.  In a 96-team NCAA tournament, these conference tournaments would be even that much more meaningless since bubble teams under the current definition would be "locks" to make an expanded field.  And none of this brings up what a ludicrous idea a conference tournament is in the first place.  Does it make sense to play 18 conference games against most teams twice (I'm not talking to you Big East--your double-bye might be the dumbest thing about the conference tournaments) and then invalidate the entire process with a conference tournament?

And the regular season?
The only benefit a 96-team tournament brings to the regular season is it makes the non-conference schedule that much more important.  If a 16-14 major conference team has lost to two second-place-in-their-conference mid-majors, one would hope the two mid-majors would have dibs on open bids in an expanded field.  But instead of discussing the regular season let's just go to the next argument.

Mid-majors will get more bids?
More bids should give mid-majors a chance, right?  Wrong.  The only time a mid-major gets any consideration when they miss the tournament is if they lose in their conference tournament after a dominating regular season (see also: conference tournament absurdity).  But the Diggers and Vitales of the world have made a career of pleading the cases of the 17-12 or 16-14 seventh best team in a major conference who gets jilted for their "tough" conference schedule.  This brings me to the fallacy of the "Strength of Schedule" argument.  If you have already lost 12-14 games during the year and are seventh in your own conference, do you really deserve to even be in the tournament?  Regardless of who they have beaten to this point, it is absolutely absurd to me that UConn is still considered a "bubble" team with a 17-14 record (and only seven wins out of 18 conference games in the Big East).  This in and of itself invalidates a good portion of the regular season if a team is able to lose double-digit games during the year and still warrant consideration for a championship tournament.

I still have not heard a good argument for why so many major conference teams with mediocre records make the tournament when there is 65-teams.  But I shouldn't be surprised at the approach--this is the NCAA after all.  There were 33 bowl games last year and there were many bowl-eligible teams who were 6-5 or 6-6.  Everybody gets a trophy.  Average is the new very good.  I'd rather have a hungry mid-major with few losses in the tournament than a big school from a big conference that thinks they are "entitled" to be in the tournament because their 14 losses were against a tough schedule.  They were losses.  The funny thing about March Madness is they don't let you advance if you lose to a tough team like Kentucky or Kansas.  They send you home packing.

96 teams will make this even worse.  Which brings me to the final point...

More Mediocre Teams Means More Mediocre Basketball
It's not that 64/65 teams is a perfect number.  It's that once you get to that point, the top 32 are really the only ones that have a legitimate chance of winning the whole thing.  And that's probably a stretch but I have to include 32 since an 8th seed has won the tournament, four 8 seeds, one 8 seed, and 2 11 seeds have made the Final Four in the past 30 years.  While the occassional upset is exciting, adding 31 teams wil not create more chances for an upset because the 31 teams (plus team 65) will be playing the lowest 32 teams and the top 32 will get a bye.  So you eventually get to 64.  So what's the point?

If you ask the coaches, they are lobbying for more teams for two reasons.  1).  It is good for the program (read: recruiting) to make the NCAA tournament and 2).  More teams should make the tournament because there are more teams in Division I since the increase to 64.  The former is a ridiculous assertion because I can't imagine a recruit will be impressed if you consistently barely make a 96-team field.  The latter is just as irrational.  It is true that out of 347 eligible Division I programs, only 19 percent make the Big Dance.  But that's what makes it so prestigious.  Look at what has happened to football.  With too many bowls and too many barely bowl-eligible teams, it has completely cheapened the product.  Bowl games are a joke now.  If it's not the BCS (another NCAA masterstroke), it's just another excuse to get together with some friends for a beer and a game.  Nothing more, nothing less.

In my mind, this is the smoking gun against 96 teams.  If this decision does not contribute to the quality of the product, it becomes change for the sake of change.  And if the product becomes more mediocre and does not garner the additional viewership, the NCAA will have created yet another laughingstock within its family of brainy ideas.  In a non-competitive environment tinkering with a winning formula is not necessary unless you are trying to fix the few flaws that exist in the system.  96, 80, even 66 teams does not fix the main flaw with the NCAA tournament and that flaw is that money rules the day.  But if the product is mediocre, not even the money will be there.

And then much like Classic Coke, we'll be right back where we started.

64 teams.

Peace,
Reg