NCAA tourney expansion?

Three more teams, not six. You'd have 68 instead of 65. This, FWIW, is the best idea of the bunch. What are we to do, turn the Final Four into an Elite Eight?

 

The only change I would make would be to have the two last at-large berths in the play-in game. Teams that won conference tournaments to merit an NCAA Tournament berth deserve more than some Tuesday night game. But that's just me.

 

Get rid of the play-in game.

At the end of the 05-06 season, teams inside the final 128 in the Sagarin rankings include 12 with losing records, including 11-17 Washington State, DFL (4-14) in its conference. Yeah, there's a team that deserves another chance to win a national title.

 

Who deserves to get into the NCAA Tournament?

Any team that has a significant chance to win the national championship. Doesn't have to be a GOOD chance. Just some kind of chance that doesn't include plane crashes, earthquakes, bird flu epidemics or the reign of Beelzebub upon the earth.

How many teams does that include? Obviously it's up to opinion, but I would say somewhere around 48 teams is the realistic cutoff. The worst team ever to win an NCAA title, 1985 Villanova, was an 8-seed, meaning it was ranked by the selection committee as appoximately the 32nd-best team in the nation. Two 11 seeds (44th overall), LSU in 1986, and by happy coincidence, George Mason this year, have made the Final Four. So, two 11 seeds in 20 Final Fours (80 teams). That's a 2.5% chance of an 11-seed making the Final Four. I guess we can call that a "significant" chance.

So, it's pretty safe to say that if you are seeded 12th or lower, you have no realistic chance to win the national championship, none whatsover.

As long as everyone who can say, "We could have won the national championship if we had had a fair chance," gets into the tournament, I don't care who else gets in or not.

Is it fair that the 63rd-ranked team gets in and the 67th does not? Is it fair that the 61st-ranked team gets in and the 97th-ranked team does not? I don't care. Neither one - none of them, really -- really deserve to be in, so who gives a sizzling shit whether one slightly-less-deserving team gets in or doesn't get in over some other marginally-less-deserving team?

Since, as many have noted, the large majority of all D-I conferences all have league tournaments, if you really want to get into the NCAA tournament, just win your league tourney and you're in. Simple.

I'm just tired of whining. All the whining.

If you want to get into the tournament, win some games. But stop the whining.

 

The thing the NABC doesn't understand is that by expanding the tournament it will actually make it easier to fire their members. If you devalue the worth of a tournament bid, your number of postseason appearances won't matter as much when firing time rolls around.

 

A valid point I made in a column about the subject I wrote this afternoon. Right now, there are 105 teams in the NCAA and NIT tournaments combined. Do coaches really think that making it to a tournament that has 23 more teams in it is going to save their asses? When has an NIT bid ever saved a coach's job, nevermind an appearance in a tournament with 128 teams.

 

If that's all you care about, then you may as well propose cutting the field back down to 24 or 32.

Bluster aside, some of us think it's the Davids that make the tournament, not the Goliaths.  

 

Maybe so, but a 12 seed can certainly screw a couple other teams' chances of winning the whole thing as well.

For many of the smaller schools that get double-digit seeds, the chance to play in a Sweet 16 game means just as much to them as playing for a National Championship.

 

If that's all you care about, then you may as well propose cutting the field back down to 24 or 32.

Bluster aside, some of us think it's the Davids that make the tournament, not the Goliaths.
After you get through the 44 teams that have a realistically-demonstrated chance to make the Final Four, it's OK with me that we invite 20 (or 22) more to give small-conference champions, major-conference middle-level mediocrities a chance to get in. That doesn't bother me much.

But when we expand the tournament beyond that, we will be allowing really, really BAD teams in the tournament. Teams that have accomplished nothing significant whatsoever.

Teams whose presence in the tournament will do nothing but drag down the level of play.

Think about it. The tournament gets expanded to 128 teams. That means the first round, however it is bracketed and seeded, will consist of the matchups 1-128, 2-127, etc etc. down to 65-64.

That means that your average first-round matchup will feature a differential of 64 seeds.

What happens when teams with a differential of 64 seeds go out, and both play equally up to their abillity?

The higher seed wins by 50-80 points, that's what happens. What happens if Duke goes out and turns its guns on North Carolina A&T? 125-68, that's what happens. Not every time, of course -- the seeding committee is not pefect -- but it's right a lot more often than it's wrong.

Of course, if that does happen, a wailing cry will rise from every sports columnist in the nation, screeching about the mean nasty horrible merciless arrogant coaches who run up the score and humiliate the poor helpless underdogs.

Knowing this is going to happen -- utterly inevitable -- what will all the coaches of the higher-ranked teams tell their players?

"Take it easy. Coast. Cruise. Ease up. Foot off the gas. Jog up and down court, make a few shots, grab a couple rebounds, win by 15-20 points, that's fine, and for God's sake don't get hurt!!"

Is that what we want to turn the NCAA tournament into: a cruise control festival?

 

Would someone PLEASE explain to me why, say, a third-place team from a smaller conference is more "worthy" than a sixth-place conference from a big mean ol' major conference? Because they won more games against crappier competition? And then we have the nerve to complain about a Georgetown padding the non-conference schedule with crap teams.

Say what you will about seeding or whatever for this season, but there were no "holy shit, how did _______ not make the tournament?" moments. Air Force and Utah State were ... charitable cases, but nobody could really beat the drum for anyone else as a slam-dunk fuckup.

By the way, the "last two teams to get at-large bids play the play-in game"? This year it would have been Bradley vs. Air Force. I'm guessing those who think it's unfair that two 16 seeds play in that game probably were hoping for something like Texas A&M vs. Seton Hall, but no, it would have been two cuddly adorable mid-majors in that spot.

I gots no beef with the mid-major school; I attended two of them. But at some point it gets a little tiring to hear "it's not FAIR!" just because the Big East has a shitload of teams in the tournament.

I thought expanding the tournament would be a good idea once, but now I'm say no. If I had it in my power, I'd designate the NIT as a 16-team play in tournament for the last four bids -- actually more like four four-team tournaments, the winner of each getting a 12-seed. But that's not about to happen, so f it.

 

No.

AGAIN I REITERATE, I'm not arguing in favor of expanding the tournament.  64 works for me.  I'm taking issue with your statement "Nobody, who deserves in any way, to get into the tournament, does not get into the tournament," which you defended in a way that suggests even fewer than 64 teams really deserve to get in the tournament.

My beefs with your statement and defending argument, in reverse order, are twofold:

1. The tournament is not and should not solely be about the teams that can win it all.

2. The committee screws up fairly often with its last few picks, selecting less deserving teams (Hello, Air Force! Support the troops!) over more deserving ones, and thus, whining is warranted.

 

I like that idea, Freelance, but I don't see them going this way. IIRC, the whole reason they went from 48 to 64 in 1985 was to eliminate the occurrence of higher seeds getting picked off by an outbracket winner. [The higher seeds didn't like how the outbracket winner had a game under its belt, the higher seed was stale, excuses, excuses]. I think that's why they went from 64 right away to 128 in their minds in the first place, to avoid that problem.

As for other people's suggestions about the play-in games, I've often thought about that myself. In different years in this decade, both the team I cover and my alma mater have been on the outside looking in [as No. 66 or 67], and I would've signed for a game in Dayton in a millisecond on both occasions.

The problem again, is that these teams would be playing in for a 12 or 13 seed. And then they would have a game under their belts when they played a 4 or 5 later in the week. Of course, we all know that 12s often beat 5s, so maybe there wouldn't be that big a complaint from the 5 seed if they lost to the play-in winner.