2011 NCAA Final Four: NCAA Final Four Proves the Need for New System

All the No. 1 seeds were gone. The last No. 1 seeds lost to two teams who were faster. Both Kansas and Ohio State were large but slow.

Were the public and NCAA selection committee duped by these teams, their coaches or the writers who love large and slow?

Certainly, some claimed the Big Twelve was very good if not one of the best conferences in the country. Yet, none gave either VCU or Butler a chance.

It is hard to say that teams that beat better teams do not have better coaches. In the run-around of the Final Four, we will have a ton written about VCU's Shaka Smart and Butler's Brad Stevens, including the fact that they are headed to bigger schools.

If they leave it will be a shame, but it still will not disprove the parity in college basketball, or the shame of leaving other teams out of the tournament.

What it will prove is that the Selection Committee, that completely sequestered group of biased college know-it-alls who never provide any proof of why they selected the teams they did, was at its worst this year.

This year's tournament also shows, certainly better than any that preceded it, that there are two areas that need improvement if the tournament is to regain respect for the selecction process, other than from those who make their livings talking to the committee and supporting their findings and the fans from the "major" conferences.

There is no question but that the NCAA needs to get a different set of rules together in order to get fairness back into the seeding process.

Is there any question that a No. 11 seed should have never been required to play an extra game in order to advance in the tournament? There is no sillier idea in all of sports. These teams need to play more games than a No. 16 seed?

Moreover, every team should play the same number of games. The idea of a First Four may be an idea to increase what you give to the media, but it is a travesty when considering fairness.

VCU playing one more game than anyone else makes no sense at all. Especially since many others ranked lower than VCU did not have to do so.

This was the palliative for the cry for more teams in the tournament?

After the 2011 tournament, we are left with the view that this Final Four could have been different if we had more teams from the "lesser" conferences in the mix. Would Witchita State have been the third team in the Final Four? We will never know.

What we do know is that there is no excuse for the number of teams that came from the Big East and Big Ten.

It may also be that every team should play in the tournament. Either way, we get more balance in the conferences and more opportunities for the lesser schools to win, and therefore recruit more players.

In the end, of course, this has to do with power within the NCAA. More money from and for large schools paves the way for more ways for these schools to make money.

And if the NCAA tells you that there is no bias, forget about it. This was the most biased tournament in history.

For fairness sake, we should not be left with the feelings some have this year. That if you were not from the Big Ten or Big East, you had less of a chance of going.

And that selecting eleven teams from the Big East made sense.

Even if they were really better than the teams that were left out.

Which we will never know because of the number of games played by the Big East against each other and the bias of so many East Coast writers and many of those in the television media.

To resolve this, we need both the changes above and public release of the reasons why the teams were picked and their seeds. Call this the majority report. I assume we will never get a minority report.

But that would be the ultimate fairness in order to see exactly how the committee chose the teams. How much horsetrading went on? Did some conference representatives get one of their teams in at the expense of another team from an unrepresented conference?

Maybe a complete transcript would also be appropriate.

The need for change is evident. Time to make them to begin to ensure fairness. Other changes are also needed, such as a better legal system for cheaters. More on this later.