For the Sake of the Game

There is no other sporting event which is as symbolic of the sport as a whole as the NCAA tournament is to college basketball. Many people have considered this to be the best sporting event of the year, and if you aren’t familiar with the tradition of filling out a bracket full of one’s tournament projections then you should probably find a new blog to read which better suits your interests. All you have to do is push the button marked “next blog” at the top of the page. It’s fine. We won’t be mad. But back to the matter at hand. The National Collegiate Athletic Association recently agreed to expand the size of the tournament from 65 to 68 teams. Although this isn’t so bad, it’s still concerning that the NCAA is thinking of expanding to as many as 96 teams in the near future. This kind of reckless expansion for the sake of making a greater television profit should concern any and all sports fans. I think we all learned from Coach Gordon Bombay in D2: The Mighty Ducks that money should never be prioritized over the sanctity and love of the game.

Anyways. Lately the topic of tournament expansion has been on the minds of the college basketball powers that be. The truth is that the NCAA tournament needs expansion about as badly as Transformers superstar Megan Fox needs plastic surgery. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. It’s a classic adage which still makes sense to this day. Unfortunately “sense” has never been particularly high on the NCAA’s priority list. They’re more into the kind of “cents” that they can make by unapologetically exploiting billions of dollars off of the ability and effort of dirt broke student athletes, but that’s a different article for a different day. (I’m not an English teacher, but I’m pretty sure that last little clause we threw in there is an example of foreshadowing. Pretty clever huh?)

So what is so bad about 96 tournament teams? If some is good then more is better, right? Not in this case. Can you really think of 31 more at large teams that had a legitimate beef with being left out of this year’s tournament? There are always going to be teams on the bubble unless we let everybody in. Disagreeing and debating about things like Who’s in?/Who’s out? is one of the great things about sports. Expansion will also lead to the death of everyone in America filling out their own bracket. The bracket is essentially perfect as composed. It’s wacky enough to lead to upsets and drama, but simple enough that anybody can understand it after one glance. The proposed 96 team bracket will feature the top 32 teams getting byes and will have to be printed in tiny font to fit on one sheet of paper. That doesn’t really sound very casual fan friendly to me. Finally, tournament expansion will essentially eliminate any value to the regular season or major conference tournaments. This aspect of college basketball is still highly entertaining. We don’t watch important in season match-ups to be cheapened by the fact that all the teams from major conferences will get into the tourney either way.

At the end of the day, expansion would only stand to harm the best event in the sport. The minor increase from 65 to 68 teams won’t have much of an effect, but if they’re allowed to expand the tournament to 96 teams the results will be disastrous. Unfortunately, there will always be more money to be made off of television contract deals. Hopefully the NCAA keeps the best interests of the fans and the athletes in mind rather than jumping at a few more dollar signs. In the long run, it’ll help to retain prosperity in college basketball.

DHP