Why, hello there, college basketball fans! How are you today? Did you enjoy the offseason? No? Me neither. But good news: It’s mid-October now. As it ever does, the start of the next college basketball season has sneaked right up on us, to the point where the college basketball media days — a kind of unofficial start to the season, cultural if not technical — are already in full swing, which you probably didn’t even realize. That’s how close we are! Media days are happening! How great is that?!
Is there a better time to be a college basketball fan? Well, yes, of course: March. Obviously. Ahh. Beautiful, perfect March. And, OK, all of the other months during the season, too. But there is also something uniquely enjoyable about these last few weeks before tip-off, about the uncertainty and optimism of all that prospective hoop, about reveling in nothing more than the idea of a full college basketball season yet to come. Dreaming of all those wall-to-wall Saturdays, all of those delirious weeknight hours on the couch, all of the possible futures branching out endlessly like before us. College sports has loads of problems still, sure, but the game itself is in a great place, and there remains something thrilling, competitively pure about basketball at its core. And here we are, not far from the start. It’s a wonderful feeling. Soak it in. Nothing can harsh this buzz.
Hahaha wait sorry never mind they’re trying to destroy the NCAA Tournament again:
“The time is now,” (ACC Commissioner Jim) Phillips, a member of the NCAA Division I Transformation Committee, said during the ACC’s annual preseason basketball event. “The time is now as we’re looking at the overall structure of the NCAA, and one of their responsibilities has been championships. So I’m in favor of looking at it, and I really would like us to expand.”
Yes, Jim, I’m sure you would.
Sigh. OK. As easy as it would be to use two words, one with four letters and one with three, and end the piece here and now, it’s worth digging into just what Jim Phillips is actually saying here, and the language he is using to say it. Here’s some more of what he said Wednesday:
“I’m a believer that the (automatic qualifiers) and winning a championship matters. It should matter. I’m not interested in reducing the AQs. I’m just not. But I’m also committed to making sure those that deserve to get into a tournament should. … You’re trying to balance the access across Division I. Making sure the AQs remain there for conferences. They need that. They need that for the financial piece of it, they need it for the emotional piece of it, to be part of it, etc. But you also have a group that at the highest level is clamoring for more access for their teams. That just leads itself to discussion of, we need to take a holistic perspective and review of college basketball and the tournament.”
Let’s translate this. The big bogeyman in NCAA Tournament restructuring discussions — which, to be clear, shouldn’t be happening in the first place — is that the big conferences will use their leverage to exclude mid-major leagues from receiving their AQs. They’ll just tear up the whole thing, use it to exclude the small teams from small leagues that actually make the NCAA Tournament special, and reset the field with high-majors, no matter how mediocre. This is not just an awful idea that would obviously backfire, it’s also a morally bankrupt way to look at the landscape of the sport. (Greg Sankey kind of-sort of floated this vague notion when he led the push on this discussion in August.)
Phillips says he doesn’t want to go that far. That’s good! But, unfortunately, well, you see, the problem here is — and you can just imagine Bill Lumbergh puttering this out while he fidgets with his coffee cup — well you see the problem here is that there’s all of these big schools, schools with lots of money and mediocre basketball programs, and they want to be in the tournament even when they’re not very good at basketball. Yeahhhhh. “But you also have a group that at the highest level is clamoring for more access for their teams.” And there you have it. This means the 2021-22 ACC, which was not a very deep or good basketball conference, to use one example, getting a bunch more of its horribly mediocre teams into a much bigger field. This sounds great for the ACC and the other power five leagues. It sounds terrible for the tournament itself. Besides Jim Boeheim — who is in favor of expanding the tournament, because of course he is — who wants to watch 16-17 Syracuse with its 207th-ranked per-possession defense play 17-15 Washington out of the Pac-12. Get Jim Nantz and Bill Raftery to courtside at once! Cue the CBS theme! Ba-bum-bum-bummmm! It’s tourney time!
Again, Phillips casts himself as a reasonable party in all this. He doesn’t want to destroy the NCAA Tournament. Of course not! He just wants to remake it in such a way that it would be less interesting, less fun, and less potent as a piece of entertainment.
In exchange for a bit more money, he wants to make the NCAA Tournament suck. Is that really so bad?
We shouldn’t need to say this, but just in case: Yes, it is. It’d be one thing if the tournament could be improved by expansion, if those arguing that it should be left alone were just being sticks in the mud. But does any neutral really think a 96-team tournament stuffed with mediocre high-major teams would be an improvement? Does anyone look at the first 28 high-major at-larges left out of the NCAA Tournament field every year and think: “What a shame. We’re really missing out.” Of course not. Did anyone like this idea 10 years ago, when the NCAA administrators were the ones pitching it? How far did it get? What are the ratings for the NIT? Where’s all the clamor really coming from?
Expanding the NCAA Tournament is tantamount to destroying it. If you water it down you might as well drown it. The thing is not successful because it offers the highest level basketball in the world, or the “fairest” competition, or the widest range of outcomes, or whatever. The thing is successful because of its structure, because of its quirks, because it isn’t some bloated all-encompassing mess. It’s three weeks. It’s six rounds. It’s perfect. It can continue to be perfect in perpetuity. There is literally zero valid reason to change it.
Hilariously, Phillips even admits this!
“It’s the crown jewel of all of our championships,” Phillips told ESPN. “There’s nothing that really duplicates it, on both sides, on the men’s side and the women’s side. So you have to be respectful of not messing it up, either, and understand it’s in a really good, healthy place. But you also have to continue to be progressive, and I try to think about those things in that way.”
Again, translated: “The NCAA Tournament is awesome, everyone knows it, we really couldn’t improve on it if we tried, but we ARE going to try, because think we can wring a bit more cash out of this thing before we totally bleed it to death. I’m progressive!”
Unfortunately, that’s a price worth paying, because — and this is the part that’s really great — it will offer more “access” to athletes:
“More access, more opportunity for more young men and women,” he said. “There’s a lot of positives to that.”
OK, this is actually not hilarious. Jim, you’ve definitely got to stop. It’s one thing to talk about expanding the NCAA Tournament as a way to make more cash. Reasonable people can disagree, even if basically everybody without a financial interest in tourney bloat thinks it’s a bad idea. We can at least go back and forth on the business plan there. Hell, we can even argue about whether you think it’s a better competitive format. Who would take that position? Not sure! But OK! Argue it if you want!
What can’t be argued is that this has anything to do with access or opportunity for student-athletes. Are you going to give them some of the money? No? Then never mention them again.
Power-conference administrators of the world: Just stop. Please. Do whatever you want with college football; make that playoff as big as you want it. You’ve got plenty of work on your hands over there. It was always weird that college football didn’t have a playoff. Now it does. Make it bigger! It should be bigger! Whatever. Or find a hobby. Golf (even) more. Start a new Elden Ring save. Take up woodworking. Paint Warhammer figures. Get more active in your church. Learn to sail. Just a few ideas! Take your busybody energy and do literally anything else with it except pay attention to college basketball. Pretend it doesn’t exist. We’re good over here. College hoops is all set, postseason-wise. It used to be too small; now it’s ideal. Has been for a while. You don’t have to keep going. There’s no immutable law of growth here. No one wants this. It doesn’t have to happen.
If the commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference, one who admits he thinks the NCAA Tournament is really great as it is, can’t see why making the NCAA Tournament bigger will make it worse, and thus less valuable to his conference and the landscape of televised sports entertainment, he perhaps isn’t the robust progressive visionary he believes himself to be.
What a bummer of a way to start a new college basketball season. It should be an exciting, optimistic time. It basically always is. Even a decade ago, when the basketball itself was kind of a slog sometimes, it was always so exciting to be this close to having it back.
Funny thing is, it’s really great now. The strategic and tactical landscape of college basketball is in as good a place as it ever has been. The talent level — veteran, experienced kids getting NIL deals and sticking around to play — is fantastic, better than at any point in the past 15 years, elite at the top and diffuse across the sport. In a few weeks we’ll tip off and then we’ll spend the next five months working toward the most glorious three weeks in sports, a postseason tournament so perfect even people who don’t like sports have to watch. It’s been a long offseason. We’re desperate for the basketball to be back.
We are desperate for more basketball, always, and never more so than now. And yet here we are, asking college athletics administrators to do less. This one time, give us fewer games. Leave us alone.
When the biggest, most dedicated fans of your product are begging you to stop crowbarring in more of it, that might be the time to listen.
(Top photo: Zach Bolinger / Icon Sportswire via AP Images)
