Why the NCAA Basketball Tournament Should Not Expand to 128 Teams
A few months ago, Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim proposed adding three more teams to the field (for a total of 68 teams). That would allow for three additional play-in games during the first round in Dayton. That seems reasonable to me. But there are now coaches who are advocating doubling the size of the tournament, from 64 teams (plus the #65 play-in team) to 128. And all of this based on one great season by one mid-major school. It doesn’t make any sense. Some of the justifications cited in a June 25, 2006, article at ESPN.com are less than convincing:
– “The number of Division I teams has increased significantly since the last major expansion more than two decades ago. The field went from 48 to 64 teams in 1985, then added a 65th team to the field in 2001 when the number of automatic bids went from 30 to 31.” (ESPN.com, June 25, 2006)
There are about 40 or 50 more teams in Division I now (334 in 2005-06, with three more – Central Arkansas, New Jersey Tech, and Winston-Salem State – making the jump this coming season) than there were back in ’85, an increase of roughly 20%. If you’re going to argue based on a pure numbers game, that’s nowhere near enough of a difference to justify doubling the size of the tournament (the 1985 change from 48 to 64 was only a 33% increase).
The play-in game was added in 2001 after the Mountain West Conference split from the Western Athletic Conference, creating an additional automatic bid, and the smaller conferences began agitating for a compensatory consideration: the play-in game. There are still 31 automatic bids now, so an argument based on that is simply irrelevant. The numbers just don’t back up doubling the size of the tournament.
– “George Mason, which was one of the last at-large teams to make the field this year, proved parity in college basketball is real. The combination of prominent programs losing underclassmen at faster rates and scholarship reductions have helped mid-major schools become more competitive. The coaches believe they deserved to be rewarded accordingly.” (ESPN.com, June 25, 2006)
Solving that problem by doubling the size of the tournament is like killing termites with a tactical nuclear device. The problem isn’t that too few teams are making the tournament, it’s that too many mediocre major-conference teams are getting at-large bids they don’t deserve simply because of the company they keep.
Looking through the 2006 tournament field, I’ve found five such teams who probably should have been in the NIT: Indiana, Alabama, Seton Hall, Arizona and Wisconsin. I’m sure if I went through the NIT field, I’d find at least five mid-major teams who deserved to be in the NCAA tournament. I still don’t understand how Alabama and Wisconsin got in over Hofstra and Old Dominion. I’d much rather have seen a 25-6 Hofstra team playing in the tournament over an 18-11 Arizona team.
– “Now that the NCAA controls both postseason tournaments, coaches think it’s time to include some of the bubble teams that annually complain when they are left out.” (ESPN.com, June 25, 2006)
Who cares if people whine about being left out? Does anyone seriously think that whining should be rewarded? Maybe you should have PLAYED BETTER. Then you wouldn’t have anything to whine about in the first place, and we wouldn’t be having this dumbass conversation.
The fact that the tournament has fewer spots than there are teams in the division means, by definition, that some teams are going to be left out. In fact, most teams are going to be left out, because 334 is a significantly larger number than 65. This is something that we in academia like to call “basic math.”
Yes, it’s inevitable that every year, someone is going to whine about being left out. But simply whining about being left out doesn’t mean that you deserved to be included. It just means you’re a sore loser. The goal of the committee should be to make sure that the right people are doing the whining (i.e., the teams that deserve to be left out) in the least unfair and demographically skewed way possible. If one of your primary motivations for expanding the tournament is “we don’t want people to be left out,” then you might as well forget about the tournament and just give everyone a trophy. You know, like they do in toddler tee-ball, where it’s all about self-esteem and they don’t keep score and no one ever wins or loses.
And anyway, I think that significantly expanding the tournament is going to cause more whining, not less, because the further down the scale you go, the more teams are involved in the discussion. Think about it: by the time Selection Sunday rolls around, there are, at the absolute most, six or eight teams involved in jockeying for #1 seeds. But when you’re talking about the annual last-in/last-out decisions, there can be upwards of 20 teams involved. And that’s when there are just 34 at-large bids to hand out.
Now imagine if you had 97 at-large slots to fill. The number of teams the selection committee has to account for, and somehow distinguish between, could run into triple digits. And what would happen to the NIT if they expanded? Presumably, the NCAA still has some kind of financial interest in it, since they paid about $5 million for it last year. But I don’t think that ESPN is desperate enough for programming to stick North Carolina A&T vs James Madison into a prime-time slot. Not when they have a whole back-catalog of three year old poker tournaments they could be showing.
And what I especially don’t get is that, while these coaches are attempting to argue the existence of large-scale parity trends, they’re using the statistical anomalies (like George Mason this year, or Vermont and Bucknell last year) as their evidence. That doesn’t make any sense at all. Those guys are blips on the radar. They’re data spikes, not consistent patterns. When you look back at the numbers, this alleged recent upswelling of quality mid-major basketball across the board is a COMPLETE FANTASY. Everyone forgets that La Salle, CCNY, NYU, Bradley and San Francisco all used to be national powerhouses. If you really look at it historically, there’s no more or less parity now than there has been at any time in the last 65 years. The only real differences are that A) it’s made up of different teams, and B) we see a whole lot more of it on TV.
All of this stuff runs in cycles. The truly consistent programs are a tiny minority: Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, Duke, and maybe Syracuse. And Kentucky had to cheat its way through the ’80s just to stay there (yet another reason to hate Eddie Sutton). The perennially terrible programs are also few and far between: Northwestern is pretty much it, at least among the major-conference teams. Even Baylor and Arizona State have the occasional decent season. All the rest of the teams in the country bounce around in the middle season after season, just hoping for the best.
I know I’m not the only one who thinks that the NCAA tournament is great the way it is. It’s not too long, it’s not too short. 65 teams provide us with all the drama and compelling storylines that we really need. Don’t get me wrong, I’d never argue that more basketball is, in and of itself, a Bad ThingTM. It’s just that we’ve already gotten about as close to perfection as it’s possible to get. The NCAA tournament is the greatest multi-day sporting event in America. Forget the BCS, forget the NBA playoffs, forget the Masters, forget the World Series. It’s the only one that has a whole friggin’ month named after it. It’s the only one that’s worth putting up with three weeks of shamefully crappy CBS coverage. It’s the only one that can make me cheer for teams I don’t care about as if I’d been rooting for them my entire life, and not because I picked them in my bracket pool, but because I like their coach or the way they play. It’s the only one that makes me sad when it’s over. In short, I care.
You just don’t mess with that.
