things kevin hates

We’re just a few days away from my favorite sports days of the year—the first round of the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament, more commonly called March Madness. Or The Big Dance. Those are the days when we see the big upsets, Cinderella trying to knock off Goliath (if I may mix my sports metaphors). The tournament is entertaining after that, but nothing compares to the frenzy of the first round. (Sure, if your favorite team is fighting for a title, I’m sure the later rounds are better, but the neutral fan is hungry for the cinderella stories, not the title contenders).

Over the decades the tournament gradually expanded; at first, only conference champions were allowed into the tourney. In 1975 at-large teams were added, and the tournament grew to 32 teams, then 40, then 48, and eventually 64. Now it’s at 65 with a largely irrelevant play-in game. 64 was perfect. No byes, no play-in games, just a perfectly balanced bracket. A few years ago they added a 65th team. The rationale at the time was that the NCAA had just gotten another conference (and thus another automatic bid), so expanding the tournament by one would keep the same number of at-large teams. Which is okay, I suppose. All it does is put an extra at-large team somewhere around the 11-12 seeds and bump the champions of the tiny conferences down a spot, putting the worst of them into the play-in game.

Now some people are calling for an expansion of the field to 96 teams. There are a number of arguments in favor of this, some better than others. The number one reason it will likely happen sooner or later is money. The tournament is the NCAA’s cash cow. In 1999, CBS signed an 11-year, $6 billion contract extension with the NCAA. That’s a lot of cash. And with that contract ending soon (2013), and the NCAA having an opt-out clause after this season, they may very well feel that more games (i.e. more chances for networks to sell commercials) could increase their revenues. There’s the possibility of a bidding war between CBS and ESPN, so it’d make sense to expand now instead of in the middle of a contract.

Needless to say, while money may rule collegiate athletics, supporters of expansion are going to have to come up with some reasons why expansion is a good idea. One argument is that Division I basketball has been steadily expanding; in comparison to many other college and pro leagues, only a tiny percentage of schools make the postseason. There’s some validity in this argument, true; but a new team isn’t going to have any shot of competing for a title for years, while a pro team could very easily make the playoffs or win a championship within a few years of its inception. And why should there be more spots for crappy teams from the big conferences just because some minnows have moved up to D-I? I really don’t think teams like North Carolina Central, Houston Baptist, Florida Gulf Coast, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, the University of South Carolina Upstate, and California State University-Bakersfield should be the driving factors in expanding the tournament.*

Most of the good arguments in favor of expansion focus on the entertainment value of the tournament. Sure, only a handful of teams have any realistic hope of winning it all, but it’s just so much fun to watch! And there’s something to be said for this. Expansion would mean another round of games, two more weekdays jam-packed with wall-to-wall basketball, bouncing around from site to site looking for great finishes and huge upsets. And it’d mean more games to guess at when filling out your brackets. As a fan, I can buy this argument. But unfortunately, there’s a downside.

Of all the major American sports, college basketball undoubtedly has the dullest regular season. A power conference team plays a few good teams early on, then loads up on cupcakes, then goes 8-8 in conference and ends up with a ten seed. Sure, a team can collapse completely (*cough* UCONN and UNC *cough*), but you’ve gotta screw up bigtime to miss out. If the tournament expands to 96 teams, it’s quite possible that the ACC or Big East could get almost every single team in. I saw one prediction a month or two ago where a 96-team field would have 11 of the 12 ACC teams and 13 of the 16 Big East teams. Now, would those teams deserve a spot? Well, surely a great many of them would be among the top 60 or so at-large schools, so in that respect, yes. But should a team that schedules a bunch of pansies out of conference, rips through them with a 12-0 record, then goes 3-13 in conference play and loses a game in its conference tourney to end up 15-14 really be playing postseason basketball? I doubt it. I’m sure the NCAA would keep its rule that a team has to finish .500 or better to qualify as an at-large team, but a 96-team tournament would almost certainly let in a lot of teams who are barely above that mark. I don’t want to make this into a big guy vs. little guy debate, because surely a bunch more mid-major teams would get into a 96-team field, but tournament expansion is really going to help the power schools who have terrible seasons—their in-conference strength of schedule would help them tremendously, and they’d probably have knocked off a couple of good teams in the course of their season. Surely a team like Connecticut would make a 96-team field, but should the 12th best team in a conference make it in? I don’t think so. And expansion would encourage the power-conference schools to play the worst teams they can find, since having a .500 record would almost guarantee them a postseason berth. So they’d be less willing to play the Butlers and Gonzagas of the world—there would be nothing for the big schools to gain. At least now a team has to make some attempt to buck up its RPI with games against respectable out-of-conference opponents. The major change is that instead of a good RPI or strength of schedule being the key factor in deciding which bubble teams make it in, the key factor would be having a .500 record. Bad, bad, bad idea.

Now, the current dullness of college basketball’s regular season isn’t really due to the playoff format. (Although, the big conference tournaments would be much more exciting if the NCAA got rid of at-large bids. I’d say I watched an even split of big conference tournament games and mid-major title games, and the excitement of the crowds and players is clearly a lot greater when a tournament berth is at stake, as opposed to just moving up or down a seed line or two.) College basketball has a number of problems—the one and done rule, the possibility of more players pulling a Brandon Jennings and going to Europe instead of putting up with the NBA’s farcical draft rules, corruption behind the scenes, academic scandals, and so on. And on a personal level, the fact that my two favorite teams (LSU and Tulane) had dismal seasons didn’t help matters. But one of the major problems is the fact that a team can lose ten or twelve games and still make it to the postseason. In other words, the stakes in any particular game just aren’t high enough. Contrast this with the regular season of college football. One loss can destroy you, so there’s a lot at stake in each individual game. Sure, I enjoy watching college basketball, even during the regular season. But I have so little reason to care about any particular game, so little reason to make anything appointment viewing. Some of that is a result of good trends in the game; it seems like there are far more quality out-of-conference games than there were ten years ago, so a matchup of big-name schools early in the season isn’t the surprise it once was. But the landscape has become so scattered; it’s hard to know who’s worth watching and who isn’t. So I end up watching network TV or an NBA game instead. Expansion of the tournament wouldn’t solve the game’s problems—and neither will staying at 65 teams—but I think it would exacerbate the insignificance of the regular season.

Again I admit that expansion would be entertaining, and yes, it would mean a lot more money. But I think the price is too high, especially the way in which it would encourage teams to play weaker schedules.

(*My apologies to any alumni of those institutions of higher learning, which I’m sure are perfectly fine and decent schools. But good luck making it to the Big Dance any time in the next 20 years.)