Every year the number grows, but in 2011 it was estimated that companies nationwide lost nearly $200 million in employee production due to the NCAA Tournament. People watch games on their office computers, take frequent bathroom breaks to check the scores and their brackets, or else just play hooky from school or work to pack arenas.
No other month-long sporting event attracts as much attention, and yet there seems to be a constant push by the NCAA to alter one of the most important pieces of its Tournament, the number of participants.
The first NCAA Men’s Division 1 Basketball Tournament was held in 1939, and only eight teams were invited. The number of teams gradually increased over the years, until it held constant at 64 from 1985 until 2000. In my opinion, the expansion should have stopped there.
The entire point of having a bracket-style playoff is to determine the ultimate “top-dog” from that particular season (a novel concept that college football just now seems to be considering). With some notable exceptions, the teams that end up playing in the Final Four are always higher seeds, and one could argue that shrinking the bracket would actually be a better way to find the best team.
The number is trending in the opposite direction, however, as greedy NCAA representatives and television networks try to bleed even more money out of the (supposedly) unpaid athletes who actually play the games. From 64 teams there came 65 in 2001, with the addition of one play-in game between the worst two teams in the Big Dance. Then just last year the NCAA added three more berths, to make it a 68-team tournament. Besides being a ridiculously awkward number for a playoff tournament, is adding those last four teams really necessary? What are the odds that one of those last bubble teams to get in the tourney is going to make a seven-game run and win the whole shebang?
Last year we saw 11th-seeded VCU win their opening play-in game against USC, then make a Cinderella run to the Final Four. This seems like damning evidence against the 64-team Tournament, but further research shows just how unlikely that feat was. In the 27 years since there have been at least 64 teams, a “bubble” team with an 11 seed or lower has reached the Final Four exactly three times. So less than 3% of all of the Final Four teams were on the bubble, and of course none of those ever advanced to the championship game.
The latest discussion is whether or not the NCAA should expand to 128 teams. This would allow more than one-third of the 344 total D1 teams to make the Tournament, which would essentially render the regular season pointless. Any middling team from one of the six power conferences that posts a winning record would be invited, and that means a lot of bad teams as the lower seeds.
For example, the 2012 Minnesota Golden Gophers have an RPI around 90th-best in the country. At 18-13, with one quality win (over Indiana) and several bad losses, the Gophers would probably be invited to participate in the most prestigious college sports tournament. Is that what we as college basketball fans really want? A mediocre Minnesota team playing on the biggest of stages?
Everyone loves the first round of the Tournament because of the rare upset possibilities, but we forget that the underdogs we root for usually have won their conference tournaments and earned an automatic berth. The extra 60 teams won’t be riding such a hot streak, and sloppy first round games will lead to a quick exit for most of them. While upsets might still happen with 128 teams, the obvious drop in quality of play for the first round is not worth whatever extra dollars the Tournament would net.
