EDITORIAL: More NCAA games equals less madness
March 31, 2010
We get it. You’re frustrated.
We are, too.
With each 1 seed that falls, with each 14 seed that knocks out Georgetown and with UNI knocking off Kansas, our brackets got worse and worse.
Our national champion was out during the first weekend — thanks again, Kansas — and things definitely haven’t improved since then.
We think it’s fair to say that this has been the maddest March of all time.
Too bad it’s almost over.
This weekend — Saturday, more specifically — the last four teams left in action will play to decide who will battle for the National Championship on Monday night in Indianapolis.
On one side of the bracket, West Virginia and Duke will face off — at 7:47p.m. Saturday night, if you’re interested in watching — in what has turned into the game many think will decide the national champion.
The Mountaineers, the East Region’s No. 2 seed, has lived up to the high expectations many experts put on them at the beginning of the tournament, and they avoided the fate of all the other No. 2 seeds in the tournament to make the Final Four, the school’s first since 1959.
Duke, the only No. 1 seed to advance to the Final Four, is likely the favorite to win it all. Duke has a tough road ahead if it wants to win the program’s first championship since the 2001 season.
While that half of the bracket features all of the remaining chalk picks, the other half is where all the madness is happening.
Two No. 5 seeds, Michigan State and Butler, will play before Duke and West Virginia face off.
Michigan State came out of the Midwest Region, a region that featured many of the tournament’s most memorable upsets — including UNI knocking off Kansas and No. 3 seed Georgetown falling in round one. Tom Izzo is one of the best coaches in college basketball, but the Spartans have a tough test in Indianapolis’ own: Butler.
The Bulldogs, ranked No. 10 in the Associated Press’ preseason poll, knocked off the West Region’s top seed, Syracuse, to earn the chance to play in the school’s first Final Four in the same city as its campus.
Even with all of this, all the good things that have happened this March, the NCAA is discussing a change in its most prestigous event.
While rumors have been swirling of a proposal to expand the 64-team tournament field to 96 as soon as next year, Big 10 Conference Commissioner Jim Delaney said earlier this week that the change was “probable.”
We don’t like it.
While we are all for more games — which would, in theory, lead to more madness — we feel like this would not be a good thing for our beloved tournament.
The deeper the field, the lesser the talent at the bottom end.
So, instead of compelling first- and second-day matchups, you’d get boring Nobody vs. Nobody on day one and then a No. 1 beating — badly, most likely — whatever 16 seed was lucky enough to squeak by a lower seed on day two.
To us, it sounds riveting.
We see through the “more games, more competition,” smoke and mirrors tactics the NCAA is trying to pull and see this move as the cash cow that it is.
Dear NCAA, don’t mess with our maddness, please.
Especially after one of the maddest Marches we can remember.