For a business that depends on fan viewership and attendance, the NCAA sure has little regard for their opinions. For nearly a decade, a heavy majority of fans have supported a playoff to determine the national college football championship rather than one championship game determined by computers. However, the NCAA has stuck to its guns, coming up with a litany of reasons, why at the moment the idea of any sort of playoffs would be impractical.
Now, with college basketball at an all-time high in popularity, it is all but official that the NCAA will expand the current 65 team postseason field to 96, giving the top 32 teams first round byes. While most fans want a college football playoff, just as many do not want any change to the NCAA basketball championship, much less one as drastic as the one proposed. However, the NCAA does not care about what the people want, because they know that they can make more money playing more high-profile games. And frankly, that is what the NCAA is: a pure for-profit machine. Every president and board member can ramble about how they are simply looking for the best interest of the student-athletes, but that is simply naïve and downright false.
The only people who benefit from a 96-team tournament are the employees of the NCAA and coaches of second-tier programs. With fifty percent more games to be played in March Madness, the NCAA can get significantly higher attendances and higher revenue from both sponsors and television deals. Also, more coaches are likely to keep their jobs for making the tournament even if their results are exactly the same as they were previously when their respective teams did not make the Big Dance.
This is all nice and good for the head coaches, but as a college basketball fan, I am adamantly opposed to such expansion. One popular argument for why to have more teams in the NCAA tournament is because the percentage of Division I schools which make the basketball championship tournament is significantly less than that of D-I teams that make postseason bowls. This reasoning is flawed on multiple levels. First of all, right now there are three postseason college basketball tournaments that are not the NCAA tournament, which has a total of 64 more teams. If the tournament expands, will there really be a need for the College Insider Tournament? So it’s entirely possible that that there will be about the same number of teams playing postseason basketball when all is said and done.
Also, in college football, only two teams have a chance to win a championship after the regular season ends, as opposed to 65 in basketball. Further, nearly every basketball team has an opportunity to win its conference tournament to automatically gain a berth into the NCAA tournament. So a football team such as TCU or Boise State not having a chance to win a championship despite going undefeated last year is akin to a mediocre Virginia Tech team not making the 65-team NCAA field? According to the NCAA, Virginia Tech basketball has more of a right to the championship than TCU. In addition, with the top 32 teams getting first round byes, there is no longer a level playing field, and the underdog upsets that the public immensely enjoys will be far less likely to occur.
In his mock bracket for next year’s projected 96-team tournament, ESPN college basketball expert Joe Lunardi had all twelve Atlantic Coast Conference teams in the field. To put that in perspective, last season the ACC had seven teams that made the tourney, and that was relatively high for the conference. So more big-money programs will be able to stroke their egos by flaming out in the first around against some slightly less mediocre program in a 16-17 seed matchup. How is this supposed to be good for the tournament? As it was, this past year, the committee had a tough time finding enough teams qualified to play in March Madness. However, the NCAA does not care what I or any other fan thinks because they know that we will still go to games and watch them on television. As for the interest of the student-athletes the NCAA is supposed to represent? As Jerry Maguire said: “show me the money.”
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