College Sports Inc. is big business, so why should conference commissioners act differently than your Fortune 500 CEO?
But, is it too much to ask for a fourth rule? That is: Don’t mess with March Madness, sports’ greatest postseason event, that beautiful spectacle we celebrate each spring. Sixty-eight bids. Thirty-two automatic berths to conference champions, plus 36 at-large bids. A mix of bluebloods, directional schools and schools you’d previously never heard of. An event during which any team can get hot and go on a run.
Apparently, it is too much to ask for the tournament to be left alone. The “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it” theory doesn’t apply where there’s more money to be made.
Count Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark among those interested in modifying the men’s tournament in the name of … fairness.
‘I want to see the best teams competing for a national championship (in basketball), no different than (the Big Ten and SEC) want to see in football,’ Yormark recently told Yahoo Sports. ‘I’m not sure that is currently happening.’
I fail to see how that’s not happening.
Allow me to translate Yormark’s quote: The Big 12’s version of P.T. Barnum wants to modify the tournament in the name of more access and money for his league.
As it is, the Big 12 rates as the nation’s best hoops conference, and it’s appropriately rewarded. Last year, seven of the Big 12’s 10 teams qualified for the NCAA Tournament.
So, what’s Yormark’s issue? That Oklahoma State, which was 18-15 on Selection Sunday, didn’t qualify for the Big Dance and instead lost to North Texas in the NIT quarterfinals? Give me a break. This is an attempted cash grab from the commissioner responsible for college basketball coming to Mexico City.
ESPN projects nine Big 12 teams to make this year’s tournament and nine more from the SEC. Again, I fail to see a tournament access issue for major-conference teams.
What’s the end game? Seventy-two teams? Maybe 96? Double the field to 136, further devalue the regular season, water down the bracket with mediocre teams, and turn the tournament into a monthlong event? By the time the championship game finally arrives, gassed athletes will be calling for IVs and oxygen so they can survive 40 minutes.
Yormark isn’t alone among major-conference commissioners hinting at a desire for more at-large bids. Last March, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey told me he’d be open to considering modifying the field. More recently, ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips told Yahoo Sports that the NCAA Tournament “needs a holistic look.”
A holistic look? Please. More like, additional at-large bids would mean more spots for major conferences’ bottom feeders. And, more bids translates to more revenue distribution for those leagues.
If you polled 100 random fans and asked them what was lacking from the NCAA Tournament, I doubt you’d find a single one who’d say: The 10th-best team from Major Conference X. That’s what this tournament needs.
What this tournament needs is to be left alone by meddlesome commissioners eager to tap into greater revenues.
Tournament tinkering would fit power-conference commissioners’ standard tactics, though.
The past few years, while NCAA officials, university leaders and coaches bemoaned so-called chaos in college sports, the guys running the power conferences caused some of the biggest chaos. Conferences from the SEC to the Big Ten to the Big 12 spent the past few years raiding rival conferences in a quest to aggrandize their television value.
The price of this game of Rob Your Neighbor? Realignment disrupted rivalries, and even ardent fans need a cheat sheet to know which teams are in what leagues. The Big Ten grew to nearly the size of Europe while spanning from Oregon to Rutgers.
Meanwhile, interconference bickering over the College Football Playoff’s format and revenue distribution is ceaseless. Just as soon as they finally approved a logical 12-team format, the playoff went back under the microscope for further review.
Try as they might, conference commissioners failed to ruin college sports for most of us. And, I’ll admit, some of the realignment maneuvers excite me. I’m itching for the revival of Texas vs. Texas A&M football next Thanksgiving.
So, go ahead, commissioners, do what you do: Look out for yourselves, and try to sidestep the doo-doo while chasing piles of cash, but please keep your hands off the NCAA Tournament.
I’m not optimistic. College Sports Inc. houses no sacred cows, especially when there’s more cash to be gleaned from the cow.
Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network’s SEC Columnist. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter @btoppmeyer.
