March Madness is here, and you should enjoy it before greed destroys one of the greatest spectacles in sports.
March Madness is one of the greatest American sporting events, debatably the second biggest cultural event in sports behind the Super Bowl. It is quite possibly a perfect tournament, with 68 teams ranging from historic powers to small-school Cinderellas placed in a single-elimination bracket where anyone can win and anything can happen.
You would think that such an event would be untouchable for interfering administrators out of fear of destroying it. It is increasingly appearing that this is not the case. SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey, fresh off of permanently altering (or butchering) the college football landscape, wants the tournament to change. “We are giving away highly competitive opportunities for automatic qualifiers, and I think that pressure is going to rise as we have more competitive basketball leagues at the top end because of expansion,” Sankey said.
Sankey apparently wants one of two things: expanding the bracket, risking oversaturation and diluting the quality of games by including mediocre teams that aren’t even sniffing the tournament right now, or eliminating the automatic qualifiers for smaller conferences, freezing them out of the tournament altogether and eliminating those Cinderella teams that make the tournament so great in the first place. Perhaps he even wants both, eliminating small conferences and adding even more mediocre teams from “power” conferences like his.
We already know that the NCAA is interested in freezing out the smaller conferences. It already eliminated automatic qualifiers for the NIT, the once prestigious tournament that has become a “best of the rest” showcase for teams who missed out on the big dance. The tournament used to have automatic qualifiers for teams who won their conference’s regular season championship but missed out on March Madness after losing in their conference tournament.
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That was eliminated this year, with the NCAA only giving 12 automatic qualifiers to the six “power” conferences instead. Had multiple schools from those conferences not decided to opt out, there would be even fewer small conference schools in the NIT. We know the NCAA wants to do that with March Madness as well, which helps explain why small Indiana State (28-6 record) was left out for brand-name Virginia (23-10) despite Indiana State ranking 28th in the NCAA’s own rating system to Virginia’s 54th. (Virginia was then blown out in its play-in game.)
All of this stems from the belief that more “power” conference teams means more viewership and more money. That is why the NCAA made that change to the NIT, and that is why Sankey and others want them to consider doing the same to March Madness. Enjoy the Cinderella stories while you can, because there is no telling when the NCAA will decide to write them out of the tournament before they begin.