Quote: Originally Posted By metsmax on 3/15/2010
Lots of discussion of going to 96 teams - basically tomake more money with another round of games to televise. But, the argument is well made that this would put a lot of teams into the Dance that truly did not excel by any measure.
Still, is the current 65 teams the right answer?
No - the better answer is a 68 team tournament and here is how it works
Seed the at large and automatic bids, but the lowest AT LARGE slot in each gets two teams - it would be slots 12A and 12B or 13A and 13B however it works out
Get rid of the annoying playin game between the bottom two automatics - and instead we have four games on Tuesday - Play In Tuesday.....or Last Chance Tuesday....or whatever. The teams that would otherwise be the last four in and the last four out play each other to decide who gets in - a competitive solution.
Matchups might be something like
Minn v Miss State
Utah State v Illinois
Florida v Va Tech
Wake v Seton Hall
An afternoon and evening of great tv, but just the 8 teams at the margin.
68 is the answer
I wish they'd go back to 64 to be honest...not that a play-in will ever win the tournament, but they'd have to win 7 games while everyone else has to win 6. Same thing happens with your setup and if I were to expand at all (not saying that I would) I would go to 72 teams....8 play-in games for the 15 and 16 slots since those teams are 4-200 all-time anyway.
With that said, I like how your concept preserves the automatic bid for the CT (should be regular season) champions, and they aren't having to play in the play-in games.
Bottom line is...I don't like 96 and I don't like some teams having to win 7 to win the title when some have to win 6. Like I said, I wish they'd cut it back to 64 because 2 of the CT champions always get screwed by having to play that play-in game that is virtually meaningless...it undermines making the tourney imo.
One last thing, I saw an interview with coach Jay Wright (Villanova?) on PTI and he was in favor of expansion of the tournament, but his reasoning was incredibly flawed. He talked about how only 18.8% or so (65/347) teams get to play for a postseason national championship in NCAAB while over half the teams in NCAAF make bowl games....uhhh Jay....2 out of 120 teams play for the NCAAF "national championship" thus if you're going to compare apples to oranges, you should make it apples to apples and include the NCAAB postseason teams in the NIT and CBI and compare that to the number of bowl teams. I can't stand when people piece-meal arguments together to make their case, and I'm sure there are a lot of folks out there now making that justification just because Jay Wright made it too.