NCAA Tournament

I've heard over and over that the NCAA Tournament is the greatest event in all of sports. Well, maybe. And generally speaking I have an opinion on how to make each and every sport's championship chase better, however, on this one it's not so much making the tournament better as making the sport better. I want to expand the tournament into a huge playoff that is 8 weeks long!

Now 8 weeks is a long time, it's pretty much just as long as the long, drawn out NBA playoffs. But I think my proposal takes everything we love about the NCAA Tournament and doubles it, then on top of that creates more excitement for college basketball. The fact is, regular season games are basically meaningless...and that's okay but when a team plays a full season of no-pressure games and then they have to win this one game in the tournament? They're in college, they may choke, give them a second chance with a series.

The regular season is boring and sucks because the games are only meaningful to the bubble teams. From mid-January to mid-March everyone is just talking about where a team's going to be seeded. So why don't we just start the tournament earlier instead of having to wait through the sports doldrums of February to get to March Madness.

First, the season begins on November 1st. For the first 6 weeks, each team plays 10 games. Play whoever you want, whether it be in preseason tournaments or at home, just play 10 games in 6 weeks. Then around December 10th (after football championship games and college finals) start playing the conference schedule. That means the next 8 weeks you're going to play 16 games. After the first week of February you'll have played 26 games and be ready for the conference championship tournament. That is played for money and pride, what have you and then have a selection Sunday with the new NCAA Tournament starting the 3rd Wednesday in February, which would be today.

Nothing's different until now. 128 teams, best 2 out of 3 in each round. Some would balk at this, I say it sounds good to me. My reasons are: gives everyone important college basketball to enjoy for an extended period of time, allows all the best teams in, and the best team will win in a best 2 out of 3. Some folks like the upset, well there will be upsets. Imagine the #2 seed going down in the first game, they are going to have to battle back and win two in a row. It'd be really exciting and I've got one more nugget to throw in. It's home and home for the first two games and then a neutral site for the 3rd game if necessary...all the way through the tournament.

The logistics: Have four 32-team regionalized brackets. They are each sub-divided into 8-team pods. Try to place each team within the geographic region they are located. Play 16 games in each of the first 4 days, then 16 in each of the next four days, then for the neutral site games you have 4 locations across the country. Each 8-team pod feeds into each location on a different day so that if all the series go to a 3rd game there won't be more than 4 games a day on one floor. So within the 32-team region, 8 play the first day, 8 the second day, etc. The first round last 12 days.

With the 2nd round you'd need to speed up. Now your pods are 4 teams so you combine with another pod in your region for the purposes of playing on the same calendar day. You play 16 games on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, then the weekend is for game 3's. Round 2 last 7 days.

You do the same thing for each subsequent round until you get down to the championship. All in all it would take 7 1/2 weeks to complete this tournament. It would take you from the 3rd week of February to the 2nd weekend of April...the Masters. So it would only extend one week past where it does now. Can you imagine the home court advantage teams would get when they play on their court in the NCAA tournament? And it's great because both teams will get that edge. As for the watered-down tournament field where there's 10 teams from the SEC and 12 from the Big East? It needs to be that way since the regular season is so short. But by the time you play 26 regular season games, conference tournament and NCAA tournament you've played 30 games.

I think this would be great for college basketball. Kill the regular season and expand the tournament. It would be great for me too because February is pretty boring after the Superbowl.

JB