NCAA Tournament Expansion: The Greatest Idea Ever

Raise your hand if you watched 1 Kansas vs 16 Lehigh. Or 1 Kentucky vs 16 East Tennessee State? What is the point of playing these games if a 16 has never beaten a 1?

Although Lehigh has no shot against a 1 seed, what if they were dropped to a 24 seed and had to play a 9 seed like Florida State in the first round? Is an upset more likely? Darn tootin'.  

Now imagine if Kansas were to play the winner of 16 North Carolina vs 17 Dayton. Another potential upset in the making? Yesiree.

The beauty of expanding the NCAA Tournament from 65 to 96 teams is that many more deserving teams will be allowed to participate in the greatest spectacle in sports. For those traditionalists, if you had to pick one or the other and can honestly tell me that Lehigh is more deserving than Virginia Tech or that Winthrop should get in and Illinois should sit out, we’ll just agree to disagree and be done with it.

Note that with expansion there will still be over 250 teams that will FAIL to qualify for the tournament. Philosophically, in a perfect world, the best 65 teams in the country should be given a golden ticket to the Big Dance. Since the Vermonts and Arkansas Pine Bluffs of the world are guaranteed some of these exclusive slots, a number of worthier teams are left out each and every year.  Thus the need for expansion.

So what’s wrong with having 13 out of 16 Big East teams in postseason play. Are they better than the mid majors that will still be left out? If so, how do you rank all of the teams? If you can find a better objective measuring stick than the RPI, please share with the rest of us. Until then, teams will need to schedule accordingly and avoid playing too many cupcakes if they want a shot at a national title anytime in the near future.

Mid major teams like Denver and Belmont have no control over how their conference brethren will play during the year. Thus, they need to follow the Gonzaga model and treat their non-conference games as their most important games. Then they need to actually win some of them. Granted, power conference teams will be reluctant to schedule home and home series with mid majors. But the bottom line is that the opportunity to play with the big boys is still available.

We live in an era where any surprises in the sporting world are immediately highlighted and available for discussion and analysis on ESPN and Fox Sports. Once you start beating the power conference teams on a regular basis and you take care of business within your own conference, enough hype (and a strong RPI) should vault you into the field of 96 as an at-large team.

So let’s discuss how expansion plays out. The first round takes place on Thursday and Friday. The second round on Saturday and Sunday. Just like that, we’re down to 32 teams. Instead of playing the third round on Tuesday and Wednesday, let’s move these games to Thursday and Friday. Then the Sweet 16 on Saturday and Sunday. We’ve played two weeks and are down to 8 teams. Play the quarterfinals on the following Saturday, semifinals on Monday, and the championship on Wednesday. The entire season is extended by only 2 days.

For the expansion critics who continue to applaud the perfection of the current format, I wonder how many of them have actually watched in entirety a 1 vs 16 or 2 vs 15 blowout. With expansion, if you want to give our mid major underdog 24 seeds a greater opportunity to succeed, pair them against a really good 9 seed in the first round instead of an elite 1 seed. And for all the 1 seeds, if you’re good enough to earn a first round bye, then you should be good enough to play a more challenging 16 or 17 seed in the second round.

For some reason, a great majority of the media, be they sportswriters or television analysts, have collectively condemned the idea of expansion. Do they not realize that more teams equals more games which leads to more articles and more job security (at least during March)?

There are so many parties who benefit from expansion, it’s a win-win for everybody. More student athletes earn the experience of playing in the national spotlight. More money is available to subsidize the remaining NCAA sports teams. More coaches retain their jobs, which allows them to create more stability within their programs.

Check that. There is one big drawback to expansion. Loss of work productivity. The amount of streaming video data thru our nation’s office computers is likely to increase. And let’s not even talk about the office pools and their brackets.