It has been reported the NCAA is considering expanding the men’s basketball tournament from 65 schools to 96.

That has to be one of the worst ideas we’ve heard in the sports world in a long time. As far as I am concerned, inviting 65 teams to play for the national collegiate championship is far too many.

How many Division 1 schools are playing basketball? 353. Why not be utterly ridiculous and let all of them be invited. Then we could call it March AND April Madness, and maybe throw in May. Instead of a three-week tournament, it could last two to three months, and overlap the first quarter of the major league baseball season.

Allen Fieldhouse, Kansas

As Joe Biddle of The Tennessean wrote in a commentary Saturday, “These are the same hypocrites who stand firmly against a college football playoff system. They are the same idealists who allow Football Championship Subdivision schools to have a 16-team playoff. These are schools that give fewer scholarships and for the most part, can’t compete with schools from the Football Bowl Subdivision.

One of the main reasons given through the years is the student-athletes would miss too much time in the classroom. So it’s fine for one set of football teams, but not the big boys who played in 34 bowl games at the end of this season. They have a problem allowing even a plus-one game after the BCS championship game, but no qualms about adding 31 basketball teams to the NCAA Tournament field? Help me with that logic.”

Biddle continued, “Only 25 teams in the country made the basketball field in 1974. It expanded to 64 teams in 1984. Adding 31 more teams would water down a field that is already filled with teams that have no chance of winning the championship.

A 16-seed has yet to defeat a No. 1 seed. The highest seeds to make the Final Four field were No. 11 seeds on two occasions. LSU did it in 1986 and George Mason in 2006. The highest-seeded team to win it all was Villanova, an 8 seed that upended Georgetown in 1985.

It would be one thing to expand if 31 more teams had a chance to make the Final Four. But this smacks of greed, more money for the NCAA coffers. You have to consider the option year of the 11-year, $ 6 billion CBS contract comes into play after this season. To expand to that degree would make the regular season even less meaningful.

No one will admit the current format is broken. It’s perfect for TV. There is no overkill and most games hold you in your seat. There is nothing to fix.”

Cameron Indoor, Duke

Joe makes some good points. And, so does Gene Wojciechowski, the senior national columnist for ESPN.com.

He writes, “Some things are perfect just the way they are. Or near-perfect. The NCAA tournament is one of those things. Not so perfect are the NCAA power brokers who are pushing hard ( and a bit too stealthily ) for tournament expansion, from 65 teams to as many as 96. This makes as much sense as other landmark NCAA decisions, such as players not getting a single dime from the $ 6 billion tournament ATM.

As always, follow the money. Because if the power brokers get their way, this will have everything to do with dollar signs and nothing to do with the aesthetics and symmetry of the tournament. If it were about the tournament itself, March Madness would already have been declared a national landmark and protected from hack-job overhauls. But the NCAA, which has a history of making really dumb decisions, is thinking about wholesale renovation. It wants a teardown when all the tournament really needs is a little more closet space.

I don’t get it. What’s not to love about the current version of the tournament? It lasts the perfect length of time ( three weeks ), with the perfect pacing ( regional games on Thursday and Saturday, or Friday and Sunday ), with the perfect three-day pause between Selection Sunday and the full beginning of the first round, and another three-day gap between the Sweet 16 and the fistfight to reach the Final Four.”

Wojciechowski adds, ” It features prominent versus unknown, big versus small, urban versus rural. It gives any team with an actual chance to win the national championship……well, an actual chance. Expanding to 96 teams……would dilute it beyond recognition. It would ruin it.

Exclusion isn’t always a bad thing. It creates drama. It gives the long regular season more meaning. There’s something at stake.

The possibility of expansion didn’t happen by accident. It happened because the NCAA can opt out of the final three years of its 11-year deal with CBS. A summer deadline looms.

As for the financial side of it, always sell high, not low. That’s what the NFL does. It understands the value of its product, waits until the economic timing is right and then opens the bidding. Meanwhile, the NCAA is considering an opt-out during the middle of a recession. How shrewd. I say leave near-perfection……alone. For once, follow the logic, not the money.”

*****************************

Expansion is also the key word in another ongoing discussion in college sports.

The object of consideration is the University of Texas athletic department.

There are rumors that both the Big Ten and Pac 10 conferences are interested in luring Texas away from the Big 12.

As George Schroeder of SI.com reports, “We’re talking about one of the nation’s premier athletic programs, and a bona fide cash cow ( for the 2008-09 school year, Texas brought in $ 138 million in revenue, with profits of $ 25 million; the football program generated profits of nearly $ 60 million).

Darren Everson of The Wall Street Journal pointed out just over a month ago that the Longhorns had a shot at arguably the biggest season in major-college history. He wrote that Texas had a realistic chance to become the first school in the modern tournament era to win three of the five marquee titles ( football, men’s and women’s basketball, men’s ice hockey and baseball ) in the same school year.

At that time, Texas was waiting to play Alabama for the national championship in football, had the number 1 ranked and unbeaten men’s basketball team in mid-January, and its baseball club was rated atop the pre-season poll of the publication Collegiate Baseball.

CROSS-SPORT DOMINATION

In the modern era, here are the schools to win two of the five marquee college titles in one season.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Schroeder says if the Pac 10 is serious about expansion, Texas has to be the primary target. Boise State and BYU won’t be invited. Utah and Colorado might be considered, but to make expansion worthwhile to add serious value to the league, which is the goal——”there’s only one school the Pac 10 should pursue: Texas.”

It has been 32 years since the Pac 8 added Arizona and Arizona State. Since then, George notes the Pac 10 “ambled placidly along. The league had to be dragged into the BCS. Old timers continue to grumble at its impact on the Rose Bowl. You sometimes get the sense the conference would be content to remain forever in 1958.”

Last summer, Larry Scott became Pac 10 commissioner, and he has said from his first day on the job that the conference is undervalued; he was hired to change that. The Pac 10′s payday from Fox and ESPN/ABC was $ 43 million in 2008. Compare that to the Big Ten, which realized $66 million from the Big Ten Network alone. Or the SEC, which just signed long-term deals with CBS and ESPN worth $3 billion over 15 years.

Texas turned the Pac 10 down once already, after the Southwest Conference dissolved and before the Big 12 formed. It has a good deal with the Big 12′s unbalanced revenue distribution, which rewards the most successful programs ( and is a source of serious discontent within the league ), and as Schroeder says, could leverage the interest from other leagues into a better deal.

George commented, ” The University of Texas already makes plenty of money, and it’s exploring the formation of its own TV network, which could produce even more revenue. Also, the state legislature could get involved, as it did in the early 1990′s, to protect other state schools. But Scott needs to at least ask the question and learn the answer. And if it means inviting Texas A&M, too, go for it. Can the Pac-10 corral the Longhorns? Probably not, but it’s worth a try. Without Texas, expansion might not be worth the effort.”

As for the Big Ten’s interest in Texas, some believe it’s merely a ploy to put more pressure on Notre Dame to join the conference.

Kirk Bohls covers the Longhorns for the Austin Statesman, and late last week, he wrote a commentary with this opening. “I’ll put this as succinctly as possible. Texas isn’t joining the Big Ten. No way, no how. So put down your Ohio State pompoms and that JoePa pennant. That straightforward enough? I’ve been assured by higher-ups at Texas that this is nothing more than a wishlist on the Big Ten’s part.”

Bohls went on to remark, “Each of the 11 schools in the Big Ten will earn more than $ 17 million a year in television revenue, but there are too many obstacles that would keep Texas frombolting the Big 12 and going north. Chief among them would be the enormous demands of travel, the inordinate amount of missed classes by all the sports teams and the likelihood that the Texas Legislature would insist that Texas A&M accompany Texas to the Big Ten. Well-heeled fans and story-hungry media would love the move. But it’s not going to happen.”

————————————

Super Bowl Aftermath:

Colts president Bill Polian said on the team’s website that the Indianapolis offensive line and special teams were outplayed by the Saints in Miami.

Nevada casinos won nearly $ 6.9 million on the Super Bowl showdown. Almost $ 83 million was wagered in the state.

Brett Favre

Sports columnist Patrick Reusse of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune had this to say about 40-year-old quarterback Brett Favre of the Vikings on Sunday……….”It’s already a cinch that Favre is coming back, to pad all those numbers, and his bank account with a $ 13 million salary and a late-burgeoning career as a product pitchman. The only thing Favre likes more than playing football is being begged to play football. The public begging started earlier this month when a group of fans paid to have a please-come-back message placed on a digital billboard near Favre’s home in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. But it will do nothing to hasten the announcement that the quarterback plans to return for a 20th NFL season. We are still months from that news conference.”

Now this is a real class act!!!

I once said that some people take their football and the fighting for their alma mater way too serious in the “big” picture of life, a game should be a game, with good sports, no hard feelings and being an adult. This was sent to me by a friend, and sort of points that out.

Just prior to the start of the Air Force-BYU football game, Sept. 22, 2009, this video was broadcast in the BYU stadium in Provo, Utah. Later, the USAF Academy Superintendent, LtGen Gould, showed this clip to the faculty and staff. He told everyone that BYU ran it minutes before the kickoff at the game. He was clearly moved by it, as were those who watched it. BYU is a class act.

BYU VS. AIR FORCE