The NCAA has produced more than its fair share of bad ideas in recent years. We can run off a checklist of them – taking away recruiting access to coaches in basketball and outsourcing any semblance of a national championship in Division I-A football and renaming it the “Football Bowl Subdivision” top the list. In light of that, it would seem quite likely that they will make adopt another bad idea before long, but we have to hope it doesn’t happen. If it does, it will be just another case of the NCAA engaging in doubletalk.
In recent weeks, news has spread that the NCAA is considering expanding the NCAA Tournament. That has come about because the NCAA can opt out of its current contract with CBS to broadcast the best event in college sports in 2010 and try to get more money for it. Along with getting more money, the thinking is that it would be an opportune time to change around the NCAA Tournament since a new contract could include logistical changes that would be a nightmare if they had to be done under the current contract.
With the bowl system in Division I, too many teams already go to a bowl game. In fact, almost as many teams go to a bowl game – 64 – as the NCAA Tournament. The problem is that in football, that’s 64 out of 120 teams – more than half. It’s one more reason why college football is a joke. There are teams in bowl games with records of 7-5 and 6-6, records that can get some coaches fired (see: Weis, Charlie). In fact, the Insight Bowl was a matchup of two 6-6 teams, meaning one was destined to finish with a losing record.
The NCAA Tournament doesn’t need to be expanded. 65 teams – just under 20 percent of all the teams in Division I – is quite enough. While there are always a few teams that might have legitimate claims to a bid, those teams could easily have won a few more games for a better claim. It’s simple: win enough games and you get a chance to play for a national championship. Don’t win enough games and you don’t get a chance to play.
If the NCAA starts expanding the tournament any further, before long it will get watered down just like the bowl games and just like some pro sports leagues. In the NBA and NHL, more than half of the teams make the playoffs. That’s not what is needed here.
Expanding the NCAA Tournament would, at some point, lessen the importance of the regular season. Think about that against the NCAA’s staunch refusal to have a football playoff in what is now the FBS in Division I. An oft-cited rationale by chairs of the BCS and conference commissioners from conferences like the SEC and Big Ten is that they want to emphasize the importance of the regular season. An expansion of the basketball tournament to 96 teams, which has been bandied about in recent weeks, would probably mean teams get into the NCAA Tournament with similar winning percentages to some of the football teams that somehow make bowl games. That doesn’t sound like emphasizing the regular season to me.
A recent column in the Wall Street Journal advocating a move to 96 teams confirms this. The column has a sidebar showing the teams that made the NIT last season, projecting them as the most likely additional teams if the NCAA Tournament had a 96-team field last season. Included in the field are teams that had wonderful regular seasons like Baylor, which went 5-11 in the Big 12 (yes, the Bears did get all the way to the NIT final, but that doesn’t justify their selection); Miami, which went 7-9 in the ACC and lost in the first round of the ACC Tournament; Virginia Tech, which also had a 7-9 ACC record; Northwestern, which went 8-10 in the Big Ten; and Notre Dame and Georgetown, who had 8-10 and 7-11 Big East records, respectively. Georgetown made the NIT with a 16-14 overall record and no conference tournament title – that’s supposed to be good enough to play for a national championship? That’s supposed to emphasize the regular season? I don’t care if you lost twice to each of the top seven teams in the country, 14 losses is too many for a team to be in a national championship event unless they grab an automatic bid.
This is not an isolated case. In years past, even teams who finished at or near the bottom of their conference have made it to the NIT. 2006 was especially full of such examples, as Wake Forest went despite finishing last in the ACC in a down year for the conference, while Penn State and Minnesota finished eighth and tenth, respectively, in the 11-team Big Ten, but that was apparently good enough – and with identically sterling 15-14 overall records to boot. Meanwhile, mid-majors who won 19 or more games and finished in second or third place in their conference were among those left out. This not only shows that the regular season didn’t matter, but also that expanding the NCAA Tournament likely isn’t going to be a panacea for mid-major inclusion as some may think.
Indeed, an oft-cited argument of late is that expanding the tournament would give more mid-majors a chance to play in it. To this end, commissioners of mid-majors that support expansion, such as Doug Elgin (Missouri Valley) and Bernadette McGlade (Atlantic 10), have been cited in articles that advocate for expanding the field. But anyone who knows how the NCAA Tournament selection works – and Elgin has served on the selection committee – should know that the likelihood of that happening is very slim. All one needs to do is look at the NIT field every year and see how it caters to high-majors just like the NCAA Tournament does, even schools that finish near the bottom of their conference. In addition, the play-in game in the NCAA Tournament always pits two automatic qualifiers against one another, which eliminates one mid-major right away – as opposed to having the last two at-large teams that make it battling each other.
There’s another reason this move would be hypocritical. In the first month of 2009, when the move was made to make all travel team tournaments in the month of April dead to Division I coaches, there was a lot of talk about academics and missed class time among the rationales for the move. I won’t get into how this doesn’t stand up to reality in this space because that’s not the main subject and I have discussed that before. But expanding the tournament significantly would translate into more weekdays with practice and media availability plus games, which would then translate to more missed class time by college students – the ones the NCAA actually has jurisdiction over. (The NCAA would love to also have jurisdiction over high school student-athletes, but they haven’t quite been able to pull that off yet.)
In light of that, such a move would not seem to mesh with the reasoning of missed class time being a major concern. Besides, we already have mixed messages being sent from athletic directors about the importance of academics. Just look at the way they talk about missed class time and the importance of it when trying to keep coaches away from travel team tournaments, but turn right around and fire coaches who graduate most or all of their players. Ironically enough, the job security of coaches is another thing proponents of expanding the field often mention.
There are lots of reasons to hope the NCAA Tournament does not get expanded. Given the NCAA’s recent history of bad moves, chances are they will expand the tournament. It also fits their history, especially in recent times, of engaging in doubletalk.
