It's that glorious time of year again -- March Madness, also known as the NCAA Tournaments for men's and women's college basketball. That means a few things for those of us on college campuses. Students skip class to watch the games, (awesome) teachers give score updates during lecture and college basketball takes over conversations more than the availability of free food ever could. Each year, this is my favorite part of the sports calendar, as March Madness provides a solid 2.5 weeks of pure, passionate hoops. There are a few issues I have with the current system, though, so if I had control over the way it was run, here are two changes I would make (and one thing I wouldn't do).
Do: Get rid of the play-in game (in the men's tournament)
There are 31 conferences in college basketball, and each conference's champion is guaranteed a slot in the tournament field. I don't understand at all why there need to be 34 at-large teams, rather than just 33. The story behind the play-in game starts during the 2001 season, when the Mountain West Conference first got an automatic bid after splitting from the Western Athletic Conference. Because of this, big conferences whined about how they couldn't get an extra team into the tournament as an at-large with all these smaller-conference champions running around, so the NCAA decided to expand the field to 65 teams rather than cut one at-large bid, like the women's tournament did.
My problem with the play-in game lies in the fact that in all eight years the game has been played, both teams in the game have been champions of their conference. For each of the past three years, in fact, the MEAC champion has been relegated to the play-in game. Of the 16 total teams playing in the "opening round game" (as it is officially known), four have come from the MEAC, three from the SWAC, two from the Big South, MAAC, and Northeast Conference and one each from the Patriot League, Southland Conference and Summit League. As you can see, small-conference schools are always the ones forced to play their way into the tournament after they already earned a bid by winning their conference.
The play-in game is held in Dayton, Ohio, so while the winner advances to the first round of the NCAA Tournament, the loser goes home and doesn't even get to taste the true tournament experience. Those teams don't get to see other teams play on the same day, they don't get to rub elbows with the national powerhouse teams and, most importantly, they don't get a legitimate shot to be a Cinderella team, while the lowliest at-large team to be given a bid never has to think about the play-in game. Granted, a 16-seed has never beat a 1-seed in the men's tournament history (it has happened once on the women's side), but that doesn't mean it will never happen. The NCAA should just cut an at-large bid and treat conference champions the way they deserve to be treated -- like a conference champion.
Do: Make sure teams can't play their way to the Final Four in their backyard state.
This applies specifically to an issue that arose this year concerning No. 1 overall North Carolina. The Tar Heels played their first two rounds in Raleigh and will play the next two rounds in Charlotte (assuming they advance). This means North Carolina will not be leaving North Carolina until the Final Four in San Antonio. That just doesn't seem fair. Home court advantage is not necessarily a big factor, because the stadiums aren't sold out just to Tar Heels fans, but my main concern is with travel. Other teams have to deal with long bus rides to airports, cross-country flights, skipping over a few times zones and overall unfamiliarity with the areas they are playing in. This makes planning difficult and requires more time that the coaching staff could be using to break down film or hold additional practices.
I'm not trying to single out the Tar Heels -- it's not their fault. They earned the No. 1 seed, and they would probably win on neutral courts anyway. I don't think, however, any team should be allowed to play four consecutive rounds in its home state, because that team is indirectly receiving preferential treatment while its opponents struggle through traveling and trying to find places to practice or eat. The women's bracket really makes it hard for road teams, too, because if a team is selected to play in the tournament and its arena was pre-picked to host games, it is seeded to play on its own court. But that's material for another column.
Don't: Expand the field to 128
Bob Knight knows more about basketball than I do. He was a player on a championship team at Ohio State and won more championships as a coach at Indiana. But I still don't think he's right when he says the NCAA should add another round to the bracket and allow 128 teams into the tournament. Can you imagine the difficulty in choosing that field? It's hard enough to seed 64 teams into a bracket, but 128? Yikes. Plus, it would be even more nightmarish to pick winners out of that large a bracket.
And let's be serious. Do we really want .500 teams in the NCAA Tournament? The NIT and CBI are in place for a reason: give the mediocre teams a chance to play in the postseason. There's no need to give college basketball (with its 341 eligible teams) the same problem college football has with its bowl games, where half the teams in Division 1-A play in the postseason.
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