If NCAA Tournament Expands, It's Time To Pay College Basketball Players

Here's how bad of an idea expanding the 65-team NCAA tournament is: When the guys responsible for defending the expansion started fielding questions on the matter, they got obliterated.

John Feinstein of The Washington Post made the NCAA VP of basketball and business strategies, Greg Shaheen, look like a blabbering idiot on stage in front of a pool of reporters.

Feinstein literally asked the same question 10 times, and Shaheen ducked, dipped, dove, and dodged the question like he was Muhammad Ali.

The source of the...uh, misunderstanding...came when Shaheen began discussing the schematics of the possible 96-team structure that's apparently been picking up steam.

According to Shaheen, the top 32 teams will receive a bye for the first round. (Ugh. How stupid can they make this thing?)

The 64 bottom teams will play the opening round between Thursday/Friday of the first weekend. Then, the 32 winners of those games will play the 32 top teams that had byes between Saturday/Sunday; after the first weekend, there will still be 32 teams remaining.

Those 32 teams will play in the Round of 32 on Tuesday/Wednesday, to get us down to the Sweet 16. Then the tournament continues as normal, following the schedule as it does now.

In other words, the tournament will still be three weeks long...but as Feinstein wisely pointed out (10 times), the teams that advance into the Sweet 16 or Elite Eight stand to miss an entire week of school during that second week.

So, Feinstein called Shaheen on this structuring nuance that seems to undermine the definition of "student-athlete," and Shaheen pretended like he didn't understand what Feinstein was asking. All Shaheen could keep saying was, "The entire first week, the majority of the teams would be in class."

Right on, Greg. Keep playing dumb.

Just to keep this straight: The NCAA is only considering restructuring their tournament because of a clause in their TV contract with CBS that allows them to opt out of the final three years of their 11-year, $6 billion dollar contract. (The NCAA would be leaving over $2 billion on the table if they walked away now.)

As they more-than-proved today, there's no logical reason to make the change...besides money.

But the people who will be earning this money—namely, the college basketball players that are dumping their blood, sweat, and tears into the game—won't leave with a single cent in their pockets if the NCAA renegotiates a better deal.

Come again? Can we get Barack Obama on this, right away?

It's hard to think of another industry (besides the BCS, anyway) where a group of people could be generating billions and billions of dollars, yet they don't make any of it.

The NCAA justifies this by allowing schools to award scholarships—in essence, the money they "earn" is a free tuition.

That's fine.

But if you're going to keep these kids out of school for entire weeks, just so you can make more money?

That's not so fine.

After Feinstein's grilling today, it seems the NCAA should have two options.

Either pay them, and admit once and for all that there's a good portion of these guys who aren't student-athletes, but really athlete-students, or don't make them miss an entire week of class and figure out another way to configure this cockamamie new tournament.

Unfortunately, without someone like Obama stepping in and preventing the bastardization of the NCAA tournament, there's no reason the NCAA won't simply tell us fans, "Nothing to see here, move along."

And yes, I'm well aware of how radical an idea it is to suggest paying college players.

But then again, isn't it equally ridiculous to make billions out of the expense of those same college players?