The NCAA Tourney

Perhaps I am getting cynical in my old age but it seems to me that everyone in sports is trying to ruin things just when they reach their highest points. The NFL will play the up-coming season with the potential for a strike or lockout looming when the season ends. The NBA will have it's own labor problems in the summer of 2011 and the NHL is still airing Stanley Cup finals games on Versus despite the spike in popularity for hockey from this years Winter Olympics.
And this brings us to the single most "perfect" sporting event of them all: The NCAA Tourney! 65 teams, 4 Brackets, 3 big weekends of basketball and more casual fans involved in some form of gambling than any other sporting event this side of the Super Bowl. This year alone we have seen some of the best tournament action of my life time. At the start of play today 8 teams have punched their ticket for the sweet sixteen and of those only 3 were given a seed that would suggest that they should be there. The rest have fulfilled the promise of the underdog and lead to thousands of facebooks posts regarding someone having to burn their bracket. It truly has been something special to watch.
So lets add 31 more teams! YEAH!!! That's how you improve on perfection! This is the way to get more student/athletes a once in a lifetime opportunity to participate in something life changing ... like an opening round game half way across the country in front of 500 people who won tickets from a local radio station. Feel the excitement.
Of course the cynics in the media will tell you that this is a combination of coaches trying to save their jobs (we made the tournament as a #20 seed, you can't fire me) and the NCAA trying to make more money off their student/athletes while maintaining a focus on education for the players who will now be asked to travel more and miss more class time. And they would be right. You can also point to the fact that people resisted expanding the tourney from 32 to 48 and from 48 to 64 and because of that expansion we now have our "perfect" sporting event.
So why should you care if the tournament expands. Maybe it will be more exciting and maybe someday we will have a #17 seed win it all, but I doubt it. In the last 21 years the lowest seeded team to win was a #4 and only once has a double digit seed even made the final four. Add to that the fact that #16 seeds are a combined 0-104 in tournament play and I find it hard to believe that there are teams being left out of the tourney that could actually win it if they were included in a 96 team field.
Then there is the real problem that comes from expanding the field which is how do you format the brackets. Currently we have four brackets seeded 1-16 and it seems illogical to add to brackets because when you get through it all your left with 6 teams to play it out and that's not going to work. Now I haven't heard of logical suggestion relating to how the tourney would be formatted with 96 teams but I'm guessing the format that makes the most sense would be to take the current 9-16 seeds and make them play the 31 new teams in what would essentially be and entire round of play in games.
At the core of this issue is the NCAA's ability to opt out of it's TV deal with CBS before the end of July what I think is completely plausible would be the NCAA striking a deal with ESPN to carry 2 days of play in games that would determine the traditional field of 64. ESPN already carries the play-in game in which two teams that no one has ever heard of compete for the right to be slaughtered by a #1 seed in the actual tournament. Considering the season long coverage ESPN provides for college basketball I imagine they would like a bigger piece of the post season pie. CBS meanwhile would simply renew the deal they have with the NCAA to reflect any adjustments the play round would bring, but ultimately carrying the 63 games to typically carries.
So it's easy to see why this would work for the NCAA (more money), for CBS it should be business as usual and for ESPN it would get a to carry a bigger piece of the NCAA tournament. Had they had that this year it might have included schools like UNC, UConn, UCLA and U of I which would all draw respectable ratings for ESPN.
So what's the problem? It all depends on what you love about the tournament. For me, I love the fact that we already have 2 double digit seeds in the sweet sixteen and 5 teams that aren't supposed to be there. There is no way to predict the future, but I imagine those numbers would be considerably lower if seeds 9-16 have to play an additional game before joining the field of 64. Which is one of the motivations for expanding I am shocked people aren't talking about. Along with the motivations for expansion I have already mentioned, how about the motivation for members of the big six conference's to want to make it more difficult for small schools to upset them in the tournament. How would the Big East feel today if they had gone 7-1 in the first round instead of 4-4 with 2 six seeds and a 3 seed losing. How likely would it be for Northern Iowa to beat Kansas yesterday if they had to win a play in game on Tuesday before beating 8th seeded UNLV on Thursday. It's hard enough for me to watch the big six conferences box out everyone else from competing for a national title in college football with the BCS, now they want to make it more difficult for smaller schools to pick off their teams in the NCAA tourney. When you think about it, it's just pathetic.
What I love about the tournament now is two things. First is watching my favorite team (MSU) go as deep as possible and the second is seeing which small schools can make it to the second weekend. It is a considered a fact that when the tournament begins there are at most a dozen teams with a realistic shot at winning. But that does not mean there is nothing for the other teams to play for. Making the sweet sixteen can be a huge boost for a program like St. Marys and Northern Iowa. For the next week they will be included in the discussion of who still has a shot at winning the national title and the exposure their programs will receive will be a benefit to their recruiting efforts. No one ever says it, but making the sweet sixteen for a small school is like making the final four if your a team from one of the big six conference's. You don't win a championship, but you do give your program a boost that can lead to continued success. It's in this way that I feel expanding the tournament is direct attempt by the big conferences to keep the smaller schools down and will potentially rob casual fans of one of the tournaments most endearing qualities: The Headline grabbing upset. Of course, I have nothing to offer anyone in regards to stopping this. I can only hope that it doesn't happen. If it does my recommendation is simple: pick all teams seeded 1-8 once it gets to the field of 64. It's not exciting, but it seems to me that, along with more money, it's what the NCAA wants.