I wanted to do this last year, but I'm going to do my best to start talking about it now. Here is my unpopular, seriously minority opinion: The men's college basketball tournament now is a complete damn disaster.
How? Really, how not? Back in 2010, when CBS extended their broadcasting contract of the tournament for 14 years and a total of $10.8 billion in conjunction with Turner Sports (specifically the networks TBS, TNT and trüTV), little did I know that they would take what was the most perfect sports event in all of sport (and that includes the Super Bowl) and fuck it up in both competition and coverage. It has become such a goddamn mess (two descriptions come to mind: "bloated" and "indulgent") that I really cannot watch the tournament anymore. I have lost the joy of sitting down in front of the TV, turning on Channel 4 (the local CBS affiliate), and seeing the ball tipped for the first game of the tournament. I have lost that joy partly because it's become a lot more fucking complicated than turning on the local channel and watching the first game, and I will do my best to delineate all the ways CBS and Turner have fucked this up before the tournament ends.
In the meantime I'm going to try and mow down my reasons. I will do so in roughly chronological order. That doesn't mean in order of importance; for some of these reasons I will get so furious I might let loose a couple of curse words, so heads-up. I just know of no other way to organize my thoughts; that's how upset I am at how what was perfect became such a shitshow, and I mean that.
I in fact went back and edited my previous blog post because I figured that incorrectly calling the teams that didn't quite make it the First Four Out was one of the things that March Madness got wrong since the advent of this new contract. It may not be directly CBS and Turner's fault, but it's close enough. So this is the second reason why March Madness sucks -- what the NCAA wants to call the "First Four."
It used to be referred to as the "First Round," thus making the traditional start of the Big Dance, the games on Thursday and Friday, the "Second Round," even though when the field was 64 teams between 1985 and 2000 (and when there was a single Play-In Game from 2001 till the end of the old contract in 2010) it was called the "First Round." And rightfully so. Because 64 teams was and is the perfect number of teams for the tournament. There are more than 300 teams in top-flight college basketball, so there is some incentive to do well in the regular season while having a wide-enough field to include all deserving teams. More importantly, 64 teams means there are six rounds to produce a winner. For virtually all of my life, that meant two games/rounds a weekend for three weekends. Long enough to make this a unique event in global sport, yet short enough to not overstay its welcome.
And most important of all, at least to me (and this won't be the first time I rant against the way March Madness is now due to inscrutable reasons that may make sense only to me), 64 is a harmonious number. All the teams that are invited have the same number of games they need to win the NCAA title. But with this capricious extra round where eight teams have to play an extra game has upset, if not destroyed, that harmony.
I still don't understand the process to determine which eight teams have to play this "opening round" game. Well, I do -- it's the four worst automatic qualifiers and the four worst at-large teams. But how do you determine that? I think that matters because for some reason the committee/NCAA/CBS/Turner has decided to make life difficult for eight teams by making them go all the way to Dayton 24-48 hours after they were told they needed to in order to play a game and then, if they win, send them to yet another city (close by, it's not as if they'll be so sinister as to send them to, say, Spokane, to take a regional city for this year's tourney) to play the "real" opening game of the tournament 48 hours after that. I don't understand how that's fair. In my humble opinion, it's just a way to add more games (and thus grab more ratings for Turner Sports, specifically trüTV, and that network is a clusterfuck in and of itself) without having to ask questions about whether or not the tournament is too big. But it already is.
And we have to go back to the fairness thing. I just don't like that the NCAA is calling all 68 teams tournament teams but making eight of them play an extra game before the traditional beginning of the Big Dance. Not to say that people who fill out brackets should get the final say as to how many teams should be in the tournament. But when you will out you bracket, you don't have to turn it in until Thursday, not Tuesday, thank God. And you don't have to figure out whether you're going to choose Michigan or Tulsa, or Wichita St. or Vanderbilt. No, that matchup is a combined entry (or a "coupled entry" in horse racing parlance) to face the team that actually made the tournament. The hundreds of millions who fill out the bracket believe the tournament begins on Thursday, and no amount of team creep and repeatedly saying the teams playing before Thursday are actual tourney teams will change that fundamental fact.
Finally, I think some people will tell me to relax by pointing out that VCU played the Play-In Game in the 2011 tournament and that it didn't hurt them because they made it all the way to the Final Four. OK, that's certainly impressive. Don't forget to add La Salle, Tennessee and Dayton, all of which won a game beyond the Play-In. But I don't see what I'm supposed to conclude from that. Did those teams find extra motivation in this supposed "slight" to propel themselves past the Play-In Game? Did this "handicap" turn into an asset by getting them into game shape before the other teams in the tournament? If so, that is an undue advantage, and if so, why don't other teams, teams supposedly better than, say, Michigan or Wichita St., get to play a Play-In Game? (Because then everybody plays an extra round and the field would expand to 128 teams. Sure -- but that means that everyone has to win an equal number of games again. Fine by me!) And if that's not the case, that means that these extra games are what anyone with a scintilla of common sense knows these games in Dayton to be: Disadvantages, games that actually punish the teams singled out for these vestigial skin tags called contests.
And we might as well make the comparison: Why do these teams have to play these early games and not others? Why Vanderbilt and not, say, Syracuse? And something that really strikes me as unfair: Why do at-large teams that are seeded higher have to play an extra game when most low-seeded automatic bids from mid- and low-major conferences don't have to? Why does, for example, Tulsa have to play a Play-In Game when, say, Cal State-Bakersfield or Buffalo doesn't? Isn't the Green Wave a better team? Can anyone really argue that the Green Wave aren't? Shouldn't they then get a "bye?" (And "bye" the way, if 60 teams get byes and eight don't, they're not "byes." There's no such goddamn thing in that case. They're in the tournament, and the other eight have to play into the tournament. My God.) And if they're not, how come they have a better seed? It doesn't make sense to me, and I will call bullshit on anyone who says that it does, and it infuriates me that people aren't more up in arms about this non-reasoning.
These Dayton games introduce a whole new set of variables that are completely unnecessary. You have sixty-four teams, more than enough to determine a rightful champion from one of them. They all begin around the same time, they all have the same number of games to win, and if they do they are the champion. That's it. And that's all that it needs to be. But the NCAA and/or the two broadcast behemoths decided to fuck that all up. So it doesn't really begin on Thursday, it begins on Tuesday, on a channel that is completely unnecessary and is (mark my words) propped up because they get these games this week. I don't want to tilt at windmills, so I can't really get all that excited about noon on Thursday anymore.
Hope that makes sense. If you have any questions or arguments, let me know. But I've ranted lone enough because I have so much else to bitch about.
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