You can have too much of a good thing, even in the magical world of college basketball.
For example, middle-aged blonde women. Just ask Rick Pitino.
Or double cheeseburgers. Just ask Rick Majerus.
Or excess cash to use as you please. Just ask Tim Floyd.
Point being, even the best things in life have to be limited at some point, top-of-the-line sports playoff formats included.
Talk has recently arisen about expanding the field for college basketball’s March Madness from 65 teams to 96 teams, a notion that has my intramural basketball team excited because we could probably qualify in a group that size.
College basketball has something uniquely special going for it with March Madness, a three-week brouhaha that is both a marathon and a sprint.
Of course, one of the elements of the system that makes it so appealing is the bracket, a concept that allows for fan participation, speculation and frustration. Ninety-six teams? Filling out a bracket is fun, but not if it looks like the Wilt Chamberlain family tree.
March Madness isn’t 19th-century America, in that expansion is critical to the success of the system. College basketball has already struck gold in California. (See: Bruins, UCLA.) Explorers have already traveled to and from the Pacific Northwest with unprecedented success, and their jerseys say “Gonzaga” on the front.
Remember the Alamo? I certainly do. As in, the 2008 Final Four at San Antonio’s Alamodome, one of the more memorable Madnesses in recent history. A Kevin Love-led UCLA team made it to the last weekend, only to fall to Derrick Rose’s Memphis team that fell short in overtime against the champions from Kansas.
Nor is March Madness a season of “So You Think You Can Dance,” in that anybody or anybodies with a clue can qualify for the Big Dance, as the college basketball playoff is affectionately known.If the field is increased, that will mean more at-large teams will have to be added, putting less of an emphasis on the regular season, a similar problem that proponents of a college football playoff have yet to address.
On the other side of the spectrum, but still anti-expansion, is the argument that none of the additional teams would have a legitimate shot at making noise in the tournament anyway. Both are valid.
Every so often there’s a Cinderella team like George Mason that comes along and goes on a thrilling cavort through the bracket. The reason that people are still talking about the Patriots is that their feat was such an anomaly. Sure there have been memorable upsets in the first round, but an 11th seed making the Final Four? Unheard of.
Adding teams to the field sounds like you’re giving more of them a shot at the prize, but it’s fairly obvious that their chances of advancing very far are smaller than Nikola Dragovic’s field goal percentage. Thus, expansion represents an unnecessary corruption of sports’ greatest playoff system. To think otherwise, you’d have to be mad.
If you have 96 hateful responses to his column, e-mail Eshoff at reshoff@media.ucla.edu.