Thursday, March 18, 2010

And the 66th best team is...

There is talk in basketball land about expanding the tournament to ninety-six teams. Now, I'm all for exciting sports but I can't think of a more unexciting way to end a perfectly good basketball season. March madness is about the only time I watch much bball, I might as well enjoy it.

So, who would be in the expanded field? Think of it this way. You would have to include the top two seeds from the NIT tournament and a few of the other bubble teams that didn't make it into a bracket. Okay, that's about ten to twelve more. On top of that you still need another twenty to twenty-two teams. We might as well let the teams that finished second in their conferences come along that don't get an automatic bid such a East-Western Northern Missouri Southern State. That ought to get you another six. That still leaves fourteen to sixteen teams to get up to ninety-six.

As this has likely given you pause to think, you're not adding quality teams into the mix you're just adding filler. The tournament shouldn't be about adding good teams. There are plenty of good teams in college, the tourney is about competing with only the best teams. You are not getting Kansas vs Texas with more teams you are only getting San Louis Abisbo St. vs the best junior college guys you can find that couldn't get an offer letter from Alcorn State Athens campus. What's the point in that?

(Credit to Jason Smith, ESPN all night host as some of this is stolen from listening to his show). But hey, I thought I would pass it along as this is about the best argument I've heard for not expanding the field.

3 comments:

  1. San Luis Obispo, but the point is made.

    Besides the NIT, there are two more college hoops tournaments going on: the College Basketball Insider Tournament, and the Inside College Basketball Tournament, or some such. And the latter two are comprised solely of Directional State Tech Hyphenated Campus schools, or schools with names that resemble the kind of names chosen at midnight by drunken amateur softball players.

    I played soccer on Team Geezer for several years; if we were going now, I think we'd have been a 4-seed in the latter tournament.

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  2. Maybe we do need 96 teams. Obviously the top 10 can't be counted on for anything!!

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