I would have written this in the newspaper if I were a college basketball columnist, but I'm not, so I'll say it here:
The assorted coaches and TV analysts who have been advocating enlarging the NCAA field to 96 or 128 or 256 or everybody in Division I all are off base.
What the NCAA needs to do is go from 65 back to 64. The play-in game is an insanely unfair, anti-climactic, cruel joke on the two teams that get stuck in it every year.
The NCAA established a rule when the field expanded in 1985 that mandated there be 34 at-large berths. So when the number of automatic bids rose from 30 to 31 in 2001, a play-in was required.
Nonsense. Change the rule to read that the number of at-large bids shall be 64 minus the number of automatic bids. Period.
Sticking two teams on Tuesday, where they cannot feel like part of the tournament, just for the sake of sneaking in one extra mediocre major conference at-large, is ridiculous.
There, I said it. Enjoy the tournament, regardless of which red-clad, high-SAT squad you might be rooting for late Thursday afternoon in Anaheim.
(UPDATE: I guess I'm not alone on this. I just found this piece by Erik Boland that is better than my screed above.)
Comments (3)
Why not just require every conference to open its tournament to every team in the conference (and that means adding a tourney, you elitist think-you're-better-than-everyone-else Ivy Leaguers!) and start thinking of those events as part of the NCAA tournament. Eliminate the at-larges and just have a tournament with the 31 conference winners (or add a conference to even out the field for 32). Then the door is open to every team, the drama heightened, and the regular season and conference tourneys mean something.
We don't think we're better than everyone else. We just think we're better than Stanford.
Here's what I get even less than I get this play-in silliness:
Our local paper this morning bemoaned the fact that Niagara, a 19-10 finisher in the powerhouse MAAC, had been passed on, not only by the NIT, but by the inaugural College Basketball Invitational
My immediate reaction was, "Who he?"
Yes, it's not enough that we get a bunch of near-.500 teams battling for a chance to be crowned as the 66th best team in the country. Now there's a new entity hell-bent on determining Who's Number 98.
It is just a matter of time before these things start spreading like the ebola virus, most likely through the Typhoid Mary carrier that is commercial naming rights, so that the tradition and pageantry of December's Chik-Fil-A Bowl will carry through to the Sonic Invitational Final Four semifinal between Little Sisters of the Poor and the Louis Braille Institute.