Good Monday Morning!
Opening Day in Cincinnati. Nothing like it anywhere, any place else. The Reds go 86-76 this season. You heard it here first.
It's also NCAA Championship night. Duke by 9, but that's just a guess. Maybe it's the last, great game in what until now has been America's greatest sports tournament
What would possess the NCAA to want to want to screw up the single best thing in sports. Why would it want to take its showcase, the field of 65 NCAA Tournament and turn it into a high school tournament?
I knew the answer to that before I even asked myself the question and you do too. It’s money. As we like to say on Sunday Morning Sports Talk, the answers to all of your questions in life is money. There are television dollars, from ESPN, Comcast, CBS, whomever that will pay the NCAA more money to televise more games and that’s why it’s going to happen.
You don’t think money drives the bus in sports? Why is the NFL going to play 17, maybe 18 regular season games? Money. The broadcast networks want more product so they’ll be able to charge more money to their clients so they can pay the exorbitant rights fees that they have to pay to televise the games.
Why are there no afternoon World Series games? Why do they start at 8:30 at night rather than two in the afternoon, or seven at night? Money. Prime time starts mean prime time advertising dollars.
Increase the teams that make the NCAA Tournament from 65 to 96, you get more product to televise and more money from advertisers, a large part of which can be flipped to the NCAA in rights fees.
The answer to everything in life is money, but even more so when you’re dealing with television.
Here’s what I’ve heard in the last week, maybe you have too. Coaches want more teams in because it’ll help them keep their jobs. Make the tournament, keep your job. Really? How ‘bout when the 96th team in knocks off the 70th team in. You think that’s going to help the coach with the 70th team?
Coaches want this because it will give their players the great experience of playing in the NCAA Tournament. No it won’t. Because the experience won’t be the same. You wouldn’t be one of the select 65. You’d be one of close to a hundred. Bigger isn’t always better.
Tell that having a field of 95 wouldn’t render the regular season meaningless. Tell me how the regular season of Xavier basketball will be enhanced by an expansion to 95 NCAA Tournament teams? Do you honestly think any Xavier fan, let alone someone who just has a passing interest in that team, will be all engrossed in whether or not they can knock off Richmond twice in January? Not when an expanded field pretty much guarantees that six or seven Atlantic 10 teams would be locks to make the tournament.
I heard the bracketology guy, Joe Lunardi say this last week. If the field was 96 this year, 12 Big East teams would have made it. Wasn’t just a couple of years ago that only 12 made the Big East Tournament? The number 12 team in the Big East this season was Connecticut. It was 7-11 inside its conference. Teams that are four game below ‘500’ inside their own conference is going to make this a better tournament?
If you’re going to do that, why don’t you just become the Ohio High School Athletic Association and let every teams in?
I could point out that expanding the tournament would render post season conference tournaments meaningless….I’m not sure that such a bad thing actually. And all of the late February, early March talk of last four teams in, first four teams out, meaningless. My buddy Jerry Palm would have to fold his web site, collegerpi-dot-com. RPI numbers wouldn’t matter.
But here’s the real thing that tells you all you need to know about the hypocracy of expanding the tournament: more games means more time in the classroom missed, right? You play more games, you miss more classes. In fact, another good friend of this show, John Feinstein, did the math. A team could conceivably stay at one venue for a week, while it plays its way through the first and second round of a tournament. Is the NCAA OK with that, or does time away from class only matter when the discussion is about a playoff in Division One football?
