Sports

All teams should participate in tourney

Cougar Pause

Christian Schmidt

There just arenit enough teams in the NCAA menis basketball tournament, and it is time to do something about it.

Most people wouldnit agree with that statement. With 65 teams in the tournamentis current incarnation, there would seem to be plenty of spots to go around. After all, itis probably reasonable to assume that only the top 10 or 15 teams really have a reasonable chance of winning the tournament.

The problem is finding those top 10 or 15 teams, because itis impossible to know who the best teams will be until they actually meet on the court.

The NCAA Tournament Committee seeds the teams according to their relative strength. The committee judges that strength using a number of criteria, including record, strength of schedule and ratings percentage index ­ a complicated formula that involves how well a team plays and how well its competition plays throughout the year.

Unfortunately, the tournament committee is often wrong. After all, those criteria arenit necessarily indicative of how a team will actually play in the tournament.

Here are two great examples from this yearis tournament. Auburn was one of the last teams to receive an at-large bid, and Butler was even farther down the list of teams to get a bid.

Auburn struggled to a 20-11 record in the regular season and broke even in conference play, going just 8-8 in the Southeastern Conference.

The Tigers won their first-round game over No. 10 seed St. Josephis in a 65-63 overtime thriller. In the second round, Auburn beat No. 2 seed Wake Forest 68-62.

Butler is perhaps an even more interesting example of the difficulty of seeding teams. The Bulldogs went 25-5 during the regular season but failed to win their conference and were lucky to get an at-large berth.

But since receiving a No. 12 seed, Butler beat No. 5 Mississippi State 47-46 and No. 4 seed Louisville 79-71, showing remarkable talent and determination.

The point is that it can be extremely difficult to predict what team will do well in the tournament (just ask the millions who fill out tournament brackets every year). So make it easy on the tournament committee and end all those disputes about what team should get a berth in the tournament and which shouldnit.

Make things interesting. Open the tournament up to every Division I-A menis basketball team, all 306 of them. Seed the teams from No. 1 all the way to No. 306. Eliminate the conference postseason tournaments, which are pretty much worthless these days, as evidenced by the number of high-profile teams that lost in their conference tournaments this season (Arizona, Texas, Kansas and Duke).

The bottom 100 teams would play each other in a preliminary round to narrow the field down to 256 teams. At that point, the brackets work out fine, with any team having the chance to win eight consecutive games and take the national title.

Sure, it is highly unlikely that, say, Houston, which went 8-20 this season, would go very far in such a tournament. But that is the point of a postseason tournament ­ to find out which is the best team.

The great strength of the NCAA menis basketball tournament has always been that every team has an equal chance to win the championship ­ unlike Division I-A football, where only two teams get a chance to play for the national title. So why not take it one step further? Give every team the chance to win the National Championship. After all, the best team will prevail in the end.

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