I’ve made clear my opinion, in the face of some dissent, that, unless done right (which it won’t be), expansion of the NCAA Tournament to a 96-team field is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad, wolf-face crazy idea that would reward mediocrity, squelch tournament magic, and generally destroy the greatest sporting event ever created.
But, well, okay, did I say “destroy”? All right, I confess, that’s a bit much. It would be watered down, it would be diminished, its cultural significance would wither, it would lose a lot of its appeal, it would be distinctly inferior to the current, near-perfect setup… but it wouldn’t be destroyed. Case in point: I’d still watch it. Avidly. Obsessively. And so would many, many other fans. And we’d eventually get used to it, at least to a large degree.
But now this, on the other hand, this really would completely and utterly destroy March Madness:
Eventually, [former Syracuse athletic director Jake] Crouthamel said he saw the Big Ten, the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Southeastern Conference and the Pacific-10 forming four 16-team superconferences and leaving the umbrella of the N.C.A.A. (Just imagine the fight between the SEC and the Pac-10 for Texas.) He said that those leagues would form their own basketball tournament to rival the N.C.A.A. tournament.
The notion of four secessionist superconferences is the Staples Solution… and, while intriguing for football, it’d be horrible for basketball.
The proposed Superconference Megatournament would presumably be a 32-team affair, taking the top half of each of the four superconferences, and pitting them against each other in exciting first-round matchups like #1 Kansas vs. #8 Arizona State and #1 Kentucky vs. #8 Texas Tech. Oh, how… thrilling. Never again would you see Hampton-over-Iowa State, or Bucknell-over-Kansas, or Murray State-over-Vanderbilt. Never again would a George Mason or a Davidson or a Butler capture the nation’s imagination. It’d be the NBA Youth League Championship. Lots of talent, no magic.
Meanwhile, the official NCAA Tournament would become a ghettoized killing field of mid-on-mid violence, with #1 seed “Goliaths” like Butler, Gonzaga, Memphis and Xavier, and #16 (or #24??) seeds scraping the bottom of the current CBI and CIT barrel. The early-round matchups would be unworthy of BracketBusters. Indeed, unless TV rights were locked in by a pre-existing contract, those early rounds would likely be broadcast on the Internet only; perhaps ESPN would deign to pick up the Final Four or something. But really, nobody would care. It’d be like the current Division I-AA (or FCS for you Orwellians) football playoffs. There would be no buzz whatsoever, no casual fan interest in such a bracket.
In one corner, David vs. David, and in the other corner, Goliath vs. Goliath, and never the twain shall meet.
This would completely destroy the appeal of college basketball to a fan like me, and to everyone who views NCAA hoops as something more than an opportunity to work on their NBA Draft predictions. I can honestly say I wouldn’t watch very much of either tournament. I would care about them roughly as much as I presently care about the NHL or NBA playoffs, which is to say, not very damn much. I’d casually half-watch when they got down to the last 2 or 4 teams, just because it’s a championship, but beyond that, meh. In the final analysis, I would simply stop being a college basketball fan. The magic that Scott Burrell and Tate George started would be destroyed by men in suits trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of a sport that was once worth watching.
Not that anyone cares what I think, of course. But if this actually happens… talk about the Sports Bubble devouring itself! Good God. Here’s how Kyle Whelliston illustrates it:
P.S. Kyle himself commented on this post. w00t! I haven’t been this nerdily starstruck since Jim Cantore tweeted at me! 🙂
P.P.S. Of course, considering Kyle was an Irish Trojan reader pre-Katrina (and pre-ESPN), I suppose it’s a little odd that I regard him as, like, a super-cool Internet celebrity now. But then, nowadays, I’m the humble proprietor of a much smaller blog than in the old days, whereas he’s the revered leader of the Mid-Majority Bubblefighters Resistance Movement (MMBRM), not to mention the Jack Kerouac of the Other 24 25. So yeah. Kyle is way cooler than me. 🙂
Anyway… I just wanted to call out the admitted irony of my statement, above, that a Superconference Megatournament would destroy the appeal of a sport that I started loving because of a pass from Scott Burrell and a shot by Tate George… in a Sweet 16 game between UConn and Clemson, a Big East team and an SEC team, both of whom would certainly be safely ensconced within the superconference fold.
But while it was games like UConn-Clemson, UConn-Duke, Duke-Kentucky, Duke-UNLV, etc., that opened my eyes to the glory of this beautiful game, it was games like Ole Miss-Valparaiso, Florida-Gonzaga, Iowa State-Hampton, Iowa-Northwestern State, etc. etc., that kept me hooked and really drew me in. And now, if you take away those games… I just don’t know that I could bring myself to care.
I still think the arbitrary red line (which is even more arbitrary when he magically declares teams that are excluded because he feels like it) is well…arbitrary 🙂
However I agree with you and Kyle that this would kill college basketball. I imagine the push for governmental involvment should the big four really secede from the NCAA would also intensify dramatically from certain quarters. It would certainly be interesting.
There’s a principle in economics that says that economic rents cannot persist, they will be competed away in the marketplace. When Detroit Mercy gets plastered by Cal, this satisfying (to Cal) outcome is reflective of substantial additional investment on Cal’s part to be that much better than Detroit Mercy.
Later on, when Butler (who by at least one yardstick isn’t that much different than Detroit Mercy) plays toe-to-toe with Duke (who by that same yardstick is quite a bit better even than Cal), Butler reaps a tremendous windfall without having to invest at anywhere near the same level as Duke. This is highly satisfying to those who love mid-major basketball, but it also represents economic rents, and those on the business end of such rents (i.e. Duke and the rest of the major conference programs) will tend to fight back.
I doubt that the major conferences are serious about a superconference-only championship. Rather, they are probably trying to extract more revenues out of the Butlers of the world – to get their share of the Butler windfall. While you don’t cheer for them in this, its hard to really blame them, looking at things from the Billy Packer/Power Conference perspective.
It’s not an arbitary red line, he has a spot where he puts it, that makes sense.
http://www.midmajority.com/redline.php
I’m not going to prosthelytize for Whelliston’s methods (at least not here), but if you want to understand his thinking, scroll about halfway down his Epilogue, the Sixth to the section titled “IV. Gonzaga, Xavier, and New Friends.”
He has a spot where he puts it except for the various exceptions. Its arbitrary.
He declares that its not arbitrary based on the arbitrarily chosen “85% wins” statistic. Why not 80%? Why not 90%? Did they choose 85% as their cutoff and then come up with the line, or did they move the line til they came up with 85%? He ignores Gonzaga completely because he thinks they skew the results because what? They have had popularity?
It’s arbitrary.
David, you don’t need to agree with Kyle, but I’d really suggest you read his post (and yes, I realized our comments probably crossed in the Internet ether) if you’re going to criticize him, because you’re mischaracterizing his methodology and his statements to some extent. First of all, the “85% wins” statistic isn’t what’s held constant; the monetary numbers are. Secondly, he’s devoted a lot of time to explaining precisely why he “ignores Gonzaga completely” (not actually true BTW) — and indeed why he now has Gonzaga, Xavier and Memphis as his three “exceptions” starting next year — so, even if you’re going to disagree, and I think there’s room for disagreement, you can’t meaningfully do so if you’re just going to make straw man arguments like “because he thinks they skew the results because what? They have had popularity?” No.
Personally, I would argue that of course it’s “arbitrary.” Any possible measurement of what he’s trying to measure would necessarily be “arbitrary,” just like all sorts of things in this world are “arbitrary.” Just to pick out a few in my field, the law, off the top of my head: blood-alcohol levels, ages of consent, monetary differences that define grand vs. petty theft, statues of limitation. These things are all “arbitrary,” but “arbitrary” isn’t the same as “meaningless.” The correct question isn’t whether they’re “arbitrary” but whether they’re logically defensible (and also, perhaps, whether they’re more or less “arbitrary” than other systems of measurement you might come up with). I think Kyle’s Red Line passes both tests, easily.
This pisses me off in multiple ways, not the least of which being that the SI columnist apparently has something against Iowa State.
How the F are these 64 schools going to tell the NCAA to “go fly a kite”? This isn’t exactly an AIAW situation, in which there was a recognizable division of labor and one was created because of active disinterest by the other. (FWIW, Iowa is the only state that has separate boys’ and girls’ HS athletics agencies – fun story in that – but they coordinate on just about everything.) The NCAA isn’t going to accept a “rump Parliament” and a 64/96-team basketball tournament without practically everybody (would there even be 64 D-I teams left?).
And that’s just football and men’s basketball we’re talking about. What about all the Olympic sports that only have participation from some of the Big-64? Wrestling, baseball, all the way down to lacrosse? You really think the NCAA is going to take dual memberships after such a mutiny?
You can’t tell me that Congress won’t be into this from the educational, tax-exempt, and antitrust angles. What Staples is suggesting is the college sports equivalent of the Civil War, and I don’t mean the Oregon-Oregon State football game.
The NCAA isn’t going to accept a “rump Parliament” and a 64/96-team basketball tournament without practically everybody (would there even be 64 D-I teams left?).
There are 320 teams in Division I, so yes, there would be plenty of teams left — 256, to be exact. A 96-team tournament would involve exactly 37.5% of those teams, which would be starting to approach bowl participation levels… and virtually all of those 37.5% would be teams we currently consider “mid-majors” or, if you prefer the Whelliston-disapproval lingo, “low majors.” Can you imagine, the SWAC or the MEAC or the Northeast Conference as a two-bid league? Could happen! And who’s psyched for #9 Hofstra vs. #24 Mount St. Mary’s, with the winner taking on #8 Iona, and the winner of that playing mighty #1 Wichita State?
Yeah… not even me.
You really think the NCAA is going to take dual memberships after such a mutiny?
Perhaps not, although college football determines its “champion” through a non-NCAA-sponsored event, so the precedent is there. But you’re certainly right that there would be huge roadblocks put up. The question is whether the combined power and might of the Big 64 would be able to steamroll through those roadblocks. I probably wouldn’t bet on it… but I also wouldn’t bet the house against it (or if I did, I’d take out a credit-default swap as a hedge against my position).
The biggest positive to this scenario is that it would effectively kill the NCAA and the thousands of stupid rules they require. Plus, as revenues increase, revenue-generating athletes can start demanding their share of the pie. The one risk is, will Congress feel pressure to remove the kind of antitrust exemptions that the NCAA and its member schools currently enjoy?
Make no mistake: the idea of a 64-team super league proffered above would be a temporary state and would cause a rapid evolution of collegiate athletics, the end point of which I think none of us (nor university presidents, nor conference commissioners) can truly predict.
Make no mistake:
Who are you, President Obama?
Let me be clear!
Hey, change isn’t easy. It won’t happen overnight. There will be setbacks and false starts.
@Brendan
I’ve definitely read the article, a couple times now. Yes any line you are going to draw is going to be “arbitrary” (he incorrectly declares that he is drawing a line down the center of D-1 amusingly), however there is arbitrary with supporting evidence and arguments and arbitrary without.
His declaration, as i pointed out above, is that its not arbitrary because of the 85%+ statistic, but thats flawed reasoning. He picked an arbitrary percentage. Or he picked a percentage that would make his pre-conceptions about which leagues fell where work out. Without justification as to why the 85% line is interesting/important, he’s just building on top of a non-existent foundation.
I’d also argue that some of his reasoning for which conferences to include/not include in each catagory is rather weak as well. He rules out the Atlantic-14 and MVC beacuse they spend more money on basketball but don’t have football. Well ok, except that means they also aren’t getting any revenue from football either, so shouldn’t you factor that in too? Seems to me they both fit squarely ABOVE the red line when it comes to his primary arguing point of money spent on hoops. And while Gonzaga has been popular, he excludes them because of “unlimted access to cable airwaves”? So he throws them out because they skew his data and he really thinks that the WAC shouldn’t be a factor? Seems like St. Mary’s showed the WAC isn’t a one horse pony this year. Its fine to explain away outliers in ones model, but i feel like his explanations lack depth, especially based on the aforementioned arbitrary 85% stat earlier.
It seems to me he is kind of picking and choosing his criteria. Is it win%? Is it overall athletic budget? Is it basketball athletic budget? Is it some related combination of the three? It would seem to me that if you were going to come up with a dividing line, the first thing you’d look at is basketball budget, i mean that kind of underlies his major point of “its about the money” right? If a league spends a lot on basketball its probably a major program.
Looking at the numbers I’d argue you have 3 broad classifications based on BBall budget:
The majors:$4-6 million range
ACC, Big East, Big 12, SEC, Big Ten, Pac-10 (aka the BCS conferences)
There is a fairly significant difference between these conferences, in terms of tv exposure, noteriety, high level success, and spending, than the rest
The mids: $1.7-3 million range:
Mountain West, Conference USA, Atlantic 10, Misouri Valley, West Coast, WAC, Colonial,
The minors: < $1.7 million
Everyone else
You could probably argue about the line between the last two, its much more continous in that range, you may have to draw upon success rates in the tournament to further refine the criteria, but it feels like there is a three tier structure sitting in that data, not a simple two tier one. As good as the Mountain West and Conference USA might be, its hard for me to see them put on the same level as the big 6 when you look at the various factors (spending, noteriety, historical success, etc). Heck you could even probably make a compelling case that there are closer to four tiers, with the $2-3 million dollar group making the secondary tier and the $1.5ish-1.9 million dollar the third, below that the fourth.
Thats just based on looking at the the raw numbers on money spent on basketball. But i'm trying to base it on specific measures (spending, noteriety, success). If i had the resources I could refine it further.
What the Red Line appears to me though is a back fit model. Massaging the data to fit the expected outcome.
Look at me, I’m commenting! I don’t allow comments on my own site, so this is truly ironic in the classic Morrisettian sense. A lot of this 96/SuperNCAA debate is over nostalgia, “what should be,” “what feels right,” and general navel-gazing. Boring! I’m glad there are forward-thinking forward-thinkers like Brendan around, who see this all in big-picture terms and are able to aggregate the information in ways that make sense. This is about economics and sociology (boring!), and the very real possibility that these people are chasing future money that will not even exist. Sports Bubble, etc., blah blah blah.
There are plenty of reasons why the big schools and conferences want to break free from the NCAA, and you can start with the very existence of the Bowl Championship Series and the millions of lobbying money that has so far successfully removed any antitrust threat. Crouthamel isn’t the only one. I’ve been hearing whispers about the SuperNCAA/Premier League for several years now (along with all the legal loopholes that would make this plausible), but the model has usually been five superconferences. I think we all know by now that the Big East’s structural weaknesses rule it out. The discussion is all about football right now, but you can bet the basketball people are thinking two steps ahead. For one thing, Plan 96 will almost certainly reduce the “basketball fund” win shares from the NCAAT. Even the mid-major conference commissioners are plenty pissed about that possibility.
A split would be bloody and messy, but there are plenty of reasons why those secret handshakes will be very easy to negotiate. The number of legal fronts the NCAA would have to open up to stop the Premier League would be staggering, and the Feds would be most certainly called in (quick! throw more money at them!). Imagine four 16-team conferences out on their own, setting their own recruiting rules, with no surprise random violations, sharing the TV and sponsor revenues however they see fit. A league run by team executives! Like Major League Baseball!
I’ve come to grudgingly accept that Plan 96 is necessary. It’s really not a greed thing, but most of a survival issue. Big picture again: the Bubble is coming, and the NCAA knows that it has to lock in the dollars (for a decade and a half!) before all the other big sports TV contracts come up in the middle part of the decade… most likely, at much lower rates than current ones. Also lost in all of this is that this March thing pays for the operating costs of championships like swimming/diving, bowling, archery, and all the women’s sports that you don’t care about. This is the NCAA’s cash cow (hint: the BCS is most definitely not).
Of course, this great 14-year plan goes in the crapper if the big boys agree that the NCAA is in their collective way. Which it is, and they already pretty much have agreed to that point. It’s going to be a rough decade. But we still love a beautiful sport, and when the ball goes up, we can forget about all that bullsh*t and just enjoy basketball. Even if the matchups suck.
Also, the popular term might be “exceptions,” but I prefer “case studies.” We are going to have lots of fun in Season 7 going back in time and figuring out why those three small schools were able to wildly succeed in ways the other 200+ couldn’t. But if people want to continue the “who is and who isn’t” cubbyhole debate, talk about “notoriety” and “expectations,” and poke holes in my methods, that’s fine too — just not on my site, thanks. That’s all just a little too “what should be” and “what feels right” for my tastes. We’re about reality, and we’ve been doing this for many years.
.k
David, parts of your critique are fair, and parts are unfair. This statement, in particularly, egregiously fails to address itself to the actual methodology Kyle uses:
“It seems to me he is kind of picking and choosing his criteria. Is it win%? Is it overall athletic budget? Is it basketball athletic budget? Is it some related combination of the three?”
The answer to this question is crystal clear and not up for debate. The win % rises and falls from year to year, as Kyle acknowledges. It is part of the justification for the concept of the “Red Line” (an argument that really addresses itself, not to your critique, but to the comments of those folks who say “there’s no such thing as a mid-major”), but it’s NOT part of the criteria for the “Red Line.”
The overall athletic budget and basketball budget are the criteria, and they remain constant. A school is “above the Red Line” if its conference surpasses the minimum overall athletic budget AND the minimum basketball budget. A school is “below the Red Line” if its conference fails to surpass either or both minimums. That said, if it surpasses one minimum, but not the other, it is a “straddler.” And then there are the three individual-exception schools (two of which are in “straddler” conferences).
It’s perfectly fair to argue about the details, whether those “exceptions” should be made, etc. But let’s not get confused about the broad outlines of what Kyle’s doing, which are pretty clear.
Now, I think your methodology is also justifiable, David. Of course, it’s just as “arbitrary” as Kyle’s. But I think they’re both justifiable ways of splitting up the college basketball world. I would argue that Kyle, in his writing — which, I’m sorry, virtually NEVER “lacks depth” — gets at those distinctions rhetorically; he certainly doesn’t pretend that a mid-major is a mid-major is a mid-major (i.e., that Butler is the same as Appalachian State is the same as Central Connecticut State). He just prefers to keep his categorizations simple, and then deal with the nuance in his writing. I think that’s perfectly fair. I also think it’s fair to create a more tiered system, as you have. The POINT, though, is that one way or another, it’s all about the Benjamins, and wherever you choose to draw the line, and however many lines you draw, it’s a complete fallacy to pretend, as some hack writers want to do, that because (for instance) Butler has had some sustained success on the court for the last several years, it should now be considered the equal of, say, Duke, for labeling purposes. Butler still has to do more with less than any major-conference program, even the really unsuccessful ones like Northwestern. And that matters. A lot.
Hey, Kyle commented on my blog! THE Kyle! w00t! 🙂
Re: “It’s going to be a rough decade. But we still love a beautiful sport, and when the ball goes up, we can forget about all that bullsh*t and just enjoy basketball. Even if the matchups suck.” … I have to admit, I felt mildly embarrassed tweeting this link at you, Kyle, because I knew you’d take issue with my statement that “I’ll stop being a college basketball fan” if this superconference thing happens. You did so gently and indirectly, which I appreciate. I wish I could say that I’m as “pure” a fan as you, who would be able to enjoy the “beautiful sport” even in the absence of a compelling competitive superstructure. But searching my heart, I just don’t think I am. I love college basketball, but I also love compelling superstructures — I am, after all, a nerd, first, last and always — and I think my love for the sport would wane in a permanent David vs. David, Goliath vs. Goliath setup. Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t attend a University of Denver game, or whatever, now and then. But for me, it just wouldn’t be the same.
Although… if the Mid-Majority would continue to exist in such a scenario, I might stay a fan just so I can keep reading your writing and being the weird USC/Notre Dame outlier in the TMM community. 🙂
P.S. LOL at AMLTrojan #12
Brendan, I see your point on the overall budget/basketball budget criteria on my re-read, although I still think that the concept of stradler because the leagues don’t have football is unfair/unclear. If we want to normalize for schools without football, then why not subtract the football budget out of all conferences. Seem like they either should or shouldn’t be above or below the red line, and since the primary determining factor here centers around Basketball not other sports or overall size of athletic department (although it can be considered). Further, I still think the exclusion of Gonzaga is a tad weak.
As to the 85%, if you are right and its an observation drawn from the data and not a criteria for the line, then the following is contradicting that:
” It’s not really an arbitrary line, because we’ve found that over the past three years, the eight richest leagues consistently have beaten teams in the smaller conferences over 85 percent of the time. ”
It’s an interesting data point if you draw the line where it is, you can certainly use it as part of a case to defend the dominance of one group over the other, but its not conclusive proof that the line is not arbitrary.
“and being the weird
USC/Notre Dameoutlier in theTMMcommunity. :)”Fixed that for you.
David, as I said, Kyle’s argument about the 85 percent thing is not really directed at your critique, but at the hackish “there’s no such thing as a mid-major” line of reasoning. Arguably, what he’s REALLY defending his system against isn’t “arbitrariness” so much as “irrelevance” or “meaninglessness.” So perhaps he used a poor choice of words in that sentence. But his methodology is clear. The 85 percent is not held constant. The dollar amounts are. The percentage shifts from year to year… but always remains around 85 percent, which Kyle uses (correctly in my view) as evidence that the Red Line matters.
I’d enjoy it still. College hoops is a very fun sport. But something really amazing will have been taken away.
And I think the smart people are those who start looking at how this affects basketball. The focus right now is on football Superconferences. But this will affect basketball as well. The GREAT BIG EAST AND ITS AWESOME AMAZING BASKETBALL will be killed. Killed dead. They’ve been staving this off on the football side for years, getting poached school by school for a while because the conference has no real power. Why else do they feature Cincy and Louisville as football schools? The Big East will completely fall apart. This does a couple of interesting things:
1. It puts basketball only schools in a bit of a bind. Where does Georgetown play? Villanova? DePaul? Do they end up getting kicked out of the Superconference system?
2. Related, but weirder . . . what happens to Notre Dame? Will this force their hand to join a conference? Standing alone in a landscape with the Big East for basketball is a nice arrangement as far as ND is concerned. But what if the Big East dissolves. ND wants to be a big time basketball power, but I suspect the Superconferences will only admit you if you bring both your basketball and football programs to the table. This would shift the ground beneath ND’s feet for the first time in a long time.
(And the more I think about it, the more I think that yes, Georgetown and ‘Nova are dropped from the Superconference system. Which makes things really interesting – NCAA college hoops would retain two major schools.)
And, as Kyle says in the graphic above, all this ridiculousness results in no football playoffs.
Des Moines Register columnist Sean Keeler has a take on the football side of Big Ten expansion:
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20100421/SPORTS05/4220340/1003/SPORTS/
Something he says early in the column reminded me of a line in a country song: “I can’t see a single storm cloud in the sky, but I sure can smell the rain.”
Meanwhile, Brian Kelly hates the idea of joining a conference. And I quote: “Ask Texas if they’d like to go to Iowa State every other year.”
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/danpatrick/blog/107801/index.html
(Man, the hate comes in from all sides.)
Also, if the B10 did try to go for Nebraska, if we had a governor with any sort of knowledge or connection to college football in Iowa he would/should try to raise Cain about Iowa State being passed over (for whatever good it would actually do, which is probably nil). But no, we have the son of a senator who went to HS in Maryland and graduated from Virginia Tech.
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