Terry Mitchell

NCAA Bait and Switch



Posted: Thursday, April 01, 2010

by Terry Mitchell
http://commenterry.blogs.com

As the NCAA men's basketball Final Four is about the get underway, I can't help but reflect on how the tournament has changed over the years. At one time, only eight teams total were invited. Back then, a team needed only to win one game to get to the Final Four.

Before too long, however, the field was expanded to 16. Year by year, more and more teams were added to the mix until the total participants reached 32. Even at that point, only one team per conference was allowed. This limitation prevented the major conferences from dominating everything and allowed teams from the lesser conferences to have a fighting chance to get to the Final Four.

However, when the NCCA first expanded the tournament beyond 32 entrants, it changed that rule and began to allow up to two teams from each conference. That wasn't too bad, but as the tournament was expanded further toward the current number of 65, the conference limits were removed.

Now we have conferences like the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, and SEC regularly sending four, five, six, or even seven teams each, while most mid-major conferences are still stuck at a just a single team. Like the effect inflation has on money, this has devalued NCAA berths for teams from the mid-major conferences. As far as those conferences are concerned, the NCAA has instigated a kind of "bait and switch." Sure, they are still getting a bid every year, but it's just not worth as much as it used to be.

Butler University, from the Horizon Conference, made it to the Final Four this year, but such a thing has become a rare phenomenon during the last 30 years. Penn (in 1979) and George Mason (in 2006) are the only other mid-major teams I can think of that have reached the Final Four since the tournament expanded to 40+ teams. And that has devalued the game.

Terry Mitchell is a software engineer, freelance writer, amateur political analyst, and blogger from Virginia, USA. He posts a least one article a day to his blog - http://commenterry.blogs.com - on subjects such as current events, politics, technology, society and culture, religion, health and well-being, self improvement, personal finance, trivia, and sports. He is also the owner of a new privacy-enhanced search engine - http://www.SearchMost.com.

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