After watching the NCAA basketball tournament championship Monday night, I was left without the feeling of there being a national champion.
Duke won the game, but I feel like Butler won the tournament.
The tournament that had 65 teams.
Talk has been circulating around the NCAA about expanding the tournament to include 96 teams.
Why would the NCAA want to do that?
College basketball already suffers enough by beginning the season while football season is still going on.
The regular season is also usually looked over until February when people are looking up statistics for teams they think will be playing in late March.
With the expansion to 96 teams, the tournament would lose the lore it has held since the previous expansions in 1985 to 64 and 2001 to 65.
They say the tournament will keep the three-week format, but would add another round.
The top 32 seeds would also get byes, negating any chance for a first-round upset of a No. 1 or a No. 2.
The NCAA would also have to move away from the iconic 64-team bracket that everyone associates with the tournament.
One reason the NCAA might give for expansion would be that UCLA, Arizona, North Carolina and UConn didn't make the 2010 tournament, the first time since the 1966, when the tournament only had a maximum of 25 teams.
Those four teams have also combined to win 19 national championships, with 11 coming from the Bruins.
Post-season play should be a privilege, not a right. If the teams didn't deserve to be in the tournament, they shouldn't have the chance to play in it.
I watch the tournament so I can see the big teams like Syracuse, UCLA, North Carolina and UConn get upset by teams like Butler, St. Mary's and Northern Iowa.
Adding an extra game to the lower seeded teams adds the risk of injury and fatigue to hurt them in the later rounds.
The lower seeds would have to play seven games to win a championship, something only the teams that play the play-in game could do now (which has yet to happen).
NCAA basketball should not follow in the footsteps of NCAA football.
Football has so many bowls, nobody can name all 33.
More than half of college football teams get to play in a bowl, basically every team with a winning record.
Another expansion makes coaching searches tougher too.
A coach looking to make a move to a bigger program would have to take his team into the second or third round of the expanded tournament to have a legitimate chance of making an impression on another school.
Coaches, however, seem to like the idea of an expanded tournament so they can pad their resumes with NCAA tournament appearances.
In the long run, the expansion of the tournament will help the power conferences to control the NCAA.
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