Left to right: Ramin Rahimian/Reuters, Jim Mcisaac/Getty Images, Ramin Rahimian/Reuters Left to right: Andy Rautins of Syracuse as his team lost to Butler in the West Regional; Kentucky beats Cornell in the East Regional semifinal; Butler’s head coach Brad Stevens after his team’s victory against Kansas State in the West Regional. Critics have long complained that the selection process in the N.C.A.A. tournament favors big-conference teams and excludes smaller colleges. The huge amounts of corporate money involved, they say, turns the tournament into a pre-packaged commercial event. This year, though, fans have been treated to some real drama.
Whether it’s ninth-seeded Northern Iowa, 10th-seeded St. Mary’s or 12th-seeded Cornell, this has been a tournament of high-spirited underdogs. How can the N.C.A.A. build on this excitement and improve
the contest to keep fans wanting more?
- Jay Wright, basketball coach, Villanova University
- Steve Rushin, author
- Rebecca Lobo Rushin, Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame
- Mike DeCourcy, Sporting News
- John Gasaway, Basketball Prospectus
- John Chaney, former basketball coach, Temple University
- Sheldon H. Jacobson, professor of computer science
- Will Leitch, sports columnist and author
- Ray Stefani, expert on sports statistics
Expand the Tournament
Jay Wright recently completed his ninth season as head basketball coach at Villanova University. His teams have appeared in six consecutive N.C.A.A. Tournaments and reached the 2009 N.C.A.A. Final Four in Detroit.
It’s time for the National Collegiate Athletic Association to expand the tournament to 96 teams from 65. While I understand the hesitancy people may have to alter this great event, I think doing so would make the tournament even better.
More teams would mean more excitement, more upsets and more amazing stories.
At Villanova we’ve been fortunate to be a part of the N.C.A.A. tournament field these last six seasons. To be included is a thrill. When you look up on Selection Sunday and see your university among those chosen there is a sense of joy that brings together all the facets of a campus community — students, faculty and alumni. By expanding the field, you offer the experience to many more athletes and coaches.
Since the tournament was last expanded on a large scale in 1985, the ranks of Division I have swelled to 343. It’s time to address that. A field of 96 teams will continue to reward outstanding regular season play.
Make It Less Corporate, Less Pre-Fab
Steve Rushin, a former writer for Sports Illustrated, is the author, most recently, of “The Pint Man,” a novel.
I love the tracksuit the West Virginia coach Bob Huggins wears in every game, practice and press conference. “Nothing but nylon” describes his wardrobe. That tracksuit is a metaphor for what the N.C.A.A. tournament ought to do: Loosen its tie or discard it altogether.
The tournament doesn’t need more gizmos or more teams: 64 is a perfect number.
The tournament is often joyous, but its stagecraft is strangely corporate. It’s a corporation bereft of Casual Friday. Every sober court is painted identically, every courtside drink is decanted into an N.C.A.A.-logoed cup, every pre-fab backdrop repeats itself as in a cheap cartoon, so that the TV viewer has no sense of where any games are being played.
One of the great pleasures of college basketball is its secular cathedrals — the Palestra in Philadelphia, The Pit in New Mexico, Pauley Pavilion at U.C.L.A. — euphonious joints jilted come tournament time for antiseptic “venues” with more seats.
For Women, a Return to Home Courts
Rebecca Lobo Rushin, a broadcaster for ESPN, is a 2010 inductee into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame.
Nine years ago in a bar in New York, I was introduced to a sportswriter who had recently ripped my profession. “Didn’t you just write something snide about women’s basketball?” I asked him.
Any game seems less exciting when played in an empty arena, squeaking sneakers echoing through the gym.
I was playing for the New York Liberty of the W.N.B.A. at the time and he was a columnist for Sports Illustrated who blushed and stammered and admitted that he had. I asked him how many women’s games he’d ever attended. Glazed in flop-sweat, he said: “None.”
It’s a problem the women’s game still endures. Every year, people who openly admit to not watching women’s basketball denigrate its marquee event, the N.C.A.A. tournament. It’s like crashing a wedding and complaining about the food.
Perfect as It Is
Mike DeCourcy has been college basketball writer for Sporting News since 2000. He previously covered the game at newspapers in Pittsburgh, Memphis and Cincinnati.
Asking how to improve the N.C.A.A. tournament is like asking to how would make “The Starry Night” a better painting or “The Godfather” a better film.
Expanding the teams would alter the tournament chemistry for the worse.
The tournament does not need to be improved. It’s already perfect as it is. Expansion would alter the chemistry of the tournament, and not in a good way.
The magical moments that this year’s edition produced — Robert Morris’s near-victory against Villanova, Murray State’s win over Vanderbilt — would be impossible in an expanded tournament. In a 96-team situation, Robert Morris would be playing a team like Wake Forest or Louisville — teams that are so minimally accomplished that even if they were to lose a game like that no one would be particularly moved.
Pump Up Selection Sunday
John Gasaway is a writer for Basketball Prospectus, and the editor of the “College Basketball Prospectus, 2009-10.”
The N.C.A.A. tournament is a matchlessly enthralling three-week spectacle. So why must it tip off on Selection Sunday with a needlessly sedate 60-minute panel discussion? To improve the tournament we need to start at the very beginning. The announcement of the brackets should be much more in tune with the unruly and wondrous madness that it presages.
Get the brackets announcement out of the TV studio and model it on the N.B.A. draft.
Every year on Selection Sunday I’m struck anew by the contrast between the drama of the occasion and the oddly serene and antiseptic feel of that tiny CBS studio. I’m sorry, I was under the impression this is kind of a big deal, not halftime of Tennessee-Vanderbilt.
I propose that the N.C.A.A. take a page from the “next level’s” book and pattern Selection Sunday on the N.B.A. draft. Let’s get this out of the studio. Nothing fun or thrilling ever started by watching someone who’s wearing a suit and sitting at a desk.
Open Up and Share the Wealth
John Chaney is the former head basketball coach of Temple University.
Improve the tournament by opening it up to more teams. Just as the number of Division I teams has increased so to should the number of teams in the N.C.A.A. tournament. Why not let the tournament go on for another week?
It shouldn’t take the tournament for fans and potential players to realize that Butler’s Brad Stevens is one of the best coaches in the country.
Every year, it’s the same top 20 or 30 teams. Why? Because they make the money, they get the exposure and they then get the top players to come to their colleges.
The smaller teams like St. Mary’s and Butler just don’t get the visibility they deserve. Potential players bypass too many great colleges because they are desperate to choose a school that’s in the limelight.
What Makes This Year Special
Sheldon H. Jacobson is a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a co-author of the paper “Seeding in the N.C.A.A. Men’s Basketball Tournament: When Is a Higher Seed Better?” published in the Journal of Gambling Business and Economics.
What makes this year’s Final Four special is not so much who is there, but also who is not. Of the four, only Duke is a No. 1 seed. Michigan State and Butler are No. 5 seeds, and West Virginia is a No. 2 seed. Past national champions
like North Carolina, U.C.L.A., Indiana and Arizona did not even make the field on Selection Sunday. It is only the second time since 1985 that two teams seeded 5 or lower have made this group (the first was in 2000).
Lower-seeded teams getting into the Final Four is mostly a matter of probability.
Does this indicate that parity now exists in college basketball, or that the selection committee got things wrong when they seeded the teams? The truth is, it may simply be probability at work.
Only once since 1985 has there been four No. 1 seeds in the Final Four (in 2008). But that’s to be expected – a field of four No. 1 seeds should occur on average once every 28 tournaments. Seedings are valuable, but they have their limitations. In researching this issue, we found that up through the Sweet 16, the rankings for the top three seeds in each region are a good predictor for who will win.
I Can’t Get Enough
Will Leitch is a contributing editor at New York Magazine, the founding editor of Deadspin and a columnist for Sporting News magazine. He is the author of the forthcoming “Are We Winning? Fathers and Sons in the Golden Age of Baseball.”
The opening Thursday-Sunday of the N.C.A.A. tournament is relentless sensory overload, starting with four games I’d reschedule social plans for any other day of the year happening at
Adding more teams wouldn’t dilute the enjoyment of the tournament. It would just give us more games.
The N.C.A.A. Tournament’s first weekend is every sweeps week jammed into four relentless days. The only tangible downside is that I’m running out of fake illnesses for my boss. I’m down to rickets.
I would say that this is perfect, but everything can be made more perfect. Much has been written and fretted about the N.C.A.A. exploring a possible expansion of the tournament to 96 teams, and whether or not it will take away from the tournament’s unique kinetics. It seems like another in the line of the N.C.A.A.’s bad ideas, the next in a sequence that includes the Bowl Championship Series, John Calipari and Oregon’s football uniforms. But in this case, more is more.
A Narrowing Gap
Ray Stefani is an expert on sports statistics and a professor emeritus at California State University, Long Beach.
I would absolutely extend “March Madness” to 96 teams. Remember that the N.C.A.A. tournament expanded from the original 8 in 1939, to 16 in 1951, 24 in 1954, 32 in 1975, 48 in 1980 and 64 in 1985.
Some teams left out are as competitive as those in the N.C.A.A. tournament.
The tournament has improved with each step toward inclusiveness. Note that there are already 32 teams playing in the National Invitational Tournament (N.I.T.), which could be folded into the N.C.A.A.s.
Assuming the RPI as an arbiter for 2005-2009, an average of four higher ranked teams should have been included in the N.C.A.A.s each year. Those excluded teams won twice as many N.I.T. games as the number of games won by those included in the N.C.A.A. tournament with lower RPI rankings.