The Living Room Times

In response to my prior tweets and blog posts condemning the potential expansion of the NCAA Tournament to 96 teams as “unspeakably dumb, absolutely ridiculous, totally insane, utterly indefensible, wolf-face crazy,” and so forth — and lamenting the possible end to the mystique of the quixotic 16-versus-1 game — Andrew last night e-mailed the following response. I don’t agree with his conclusion, but his arguments are worth airing, I think, so I’m reproducing what he wrote in full.

I had the same reaction as you when I first read the rumors — why in the world would they blow up the wildly successful NCAA basketball tournament and expand it? And with initial public response being overwhelmingly negative, why would they still insist on making the change???

However, as I have been digesting the concept, it’s starting to make sense to me, and I’m beginning to think that their stubbornness is borne of confidence that they’ve really hit a home run here that addresses a lot of issues. To wit:

1) The play-in game is a joke, so they need some other way to stake their claim to prime-time on the first couple of days of March Madness. What better way than to fill the Tuesday and Wednesday with games that actually mean something and advance winners capable of moving deeper into the tournament?

2) The 1-16 and 2-15 games are dreadful. Yes, for some uber-nerdy fans (I won’t mention any names), losing the chance to see Buttf**k Nowhere State upset North Carolina in the first round is absolutely tragic. But for the rest of us, it’s a complete bore watching 1 and 2 seeds routinely slaughter opponents who made the tournament only because their piddly small-school’s conference’s tournament winner is guaranteed a slot. The 1 and 2 seed games have to be televised on the main feeds, but the TV execs go into this knowing that 3/4 of the country is going to flip the channel after the first quarter, leaving only the 1 and 2 seed alumni and bandwagon fans. If you expand the field to 96 and bump the automatic bids from the weaker conferences to seeds 20-24, you are guaranteed round-of-64 (formerly known as the first round) games that are statistically more compelling and holding the potential for upsets. The new 15 thru 18 seeds will be teams that would normally have gone to the NIT and contended for an NIT title, and 1 and 2 seeds would be advised to not take them lightly.

3) What makes March Madness so much fun? Why do millions of people fill out brackets? UPSETS! By expanding to 96, the podunk automatic qualifiers will face opponents in games where victory poses much shorter odds than if they had to face a top seed. And as noted above, the 15 thru 18 seeds will collectively be far stronger and more capable of upsetting the 1 and 2 seeds.

4) By expanding to 96, you finally give a meaningful advantage to the 7 and 8 seeds. Heretofore, the 7-10 and 8-9 games have been statistical toss-ups. With the new format, the 7 and 8 seeds now face the potential of a matchup against a 23 or 24 seed, and even if they face a 9 or 10 seed, the higher seeded teams will be rested while the lower seeded teams will be coming in having already had to play a game and with only one day to recuperate and prepare for their next opponent. In this scenario, a victory by a 9 or a 10 seed is closer to an actual upset.

5) You’re not affecting the overall length of the tournament; the TV schedule remains virtually the same. The conference tourneys can still finish the weekend before, and the Final Four is still the first weekend in April.

6) You potentially kill off the meaningless and increasingly difficult-to-justify NIT and CBI tournaments, which compete for air time and which nobody wants to watch anyways.

7) All those lame Selection Sunday shows decrying the high RPI but middle-of-the-pack schools who got left out (whether from major or mid-major conferences) are put out of their misery. Anyone with a pulse is now in the dance, and you no longer have to debate whether a 4th place team from the Missouri Valley Conference that went 23-7 carrying an RPI rating of 42 should have been invited over a 8th place Big East team that went 18-14 with an RPI rating of 29. Not to mention, fairly seeding teams 7 through 16 now becomes far, far easier.

The only real downside to going to 96 teams is that people will have to stock up on legal paper in order to successfully print out their brackets, but for those of us who debate our predicted upsets around the water cooler and print our brackets using company-provided all-in-one Xerox or Lexmark machines, this is but a very minor setback. I am becoming increasingly convinced that a 96-team tournament will mean even more money for NCAA programs and CBS, and an even better tournament overall.

I’m not sure why “fairly seeding teams 7 through 16 now becomes far, far easier” — I think it becomes quite a bit harder, as you now have a much larger mass of virtually undifferentiated mediocre teams, with no significant dropoff until around the #20 seed line — but otherwise Andrew makes some good points, even though I still think the cons outweigh the pros. Perhaps I’ll at least stop using “wolf-face crazy” to describe expansion. 🙂

Of course, what some regard as a feature, others regard as a bug. Andrew wants to see #1s and #2s play better opponents in the round of 64, but Jazz makes the point that this means they will sometimes be screwed in relation to the #8 seed, which hasn’t “earned” the right to play a Morehead State-type team, but will occasionally get to do so anyway:

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