Ever since the people who run college football crushed the NCAA and replaced it with an unworkable new economy based entirely on fraud-coated banditry, the old mall cops in Indianapolis have not really known what to do with themselves. There's still plenty of money in big-time college sports, but a vacuum where their old authority used to be. The basketball tournament is that failed state's principal cash cow, and it still delivers, but the horse has otherwise departed the barn for life on a crowded interstate, which will ultimately be bad for the horse. And so, with nothing better to do while they watch the old structure slowly collapse under the weight of a shifting foundation and dry rot, the NCAA's powers-that-were mostly seem to be concerning themselves with putting a series of painted concrete hats on the cash cow that remains—you know, to make it "better."
And so they are expanding the tournaments, both men's and women's, to 76 teams; the decision has not yet been voted on, but is reported to be a virtual lock. It's what nobody asked for, and the eight new at-large teams in the field will be worse than the teams that currently make it. It's tough to find much appealing in it, but also that doesn't matter. These days, the best way to get something you didn't know you didn't want is simply to wait awhile until it shows up in batteries-not-included type somewhere on your property tax bill.
The logistics of the jumbo touranment are simple enough. Instead of having four play-in games, they'll have eight, half in Dayton and half in Something-Something Flats, Utah. The NCAA will tell you that those aren't actual tournament games, because they too believe in the basic sanctity of the 64-team bracket that has nourished them for 40 years. And because these aren't tournament games per se, they will be treated by the general public with the same essential disdain currently afforded the play-in games, which is mostly to say that they won't include them in their office pools. If there is a greater example of nothing of worth being performed nowhere in particular, it is the annual NFL schedule release, but that's still a couple of weeks away.
This news, long expected but not awaited, was broken by ESPN's very estimable college basketball transom peeker, Pete Thamel, although his story had one bright red herring in it. That would be the eleventh paragraph, which reads:
The primary driver of this move hasn't been money, but rather access for at-large bids for power conferences. The expansion has been pushed by power conferences, which have grown throughout the course of the current deal.
What he clearly meant to say was, "the primary driver of this move has of course been money, because that's the only thing that ever drives any of these scabrous billboard lawyers. The expansion has been pushed by power conferences, who fully expect to have their lesser members fill those extra 12 slots so that they won't have to drag-ass back to their alums and say, 'We need money to pay off the coach we're about to fire because we got stuck in the goddamn NIT.'"
But we can forgive Thamel this one inadvertent error because, given that he has done this for awhile, he probably considered it an obvious inference based on the reflexively rapacious behaviors of the people involved. The NCAA is trying to pay tribute to keep the power conferences—the institutions that are, amusingly, the instruments of its eventual death—from killing it today. This is a pretty good strategy when it's the only one available. The funny part, though, is that the power conferences want the NCAA dead no matter what. They want this so that their pals in government can create a new governing body through legislation, and so have their industrial larcenies sanctioned and controlled within a structure that lets them step on the burgeoning player compensation movement. Evidently, the big conferences want a system that allows them to pirate other schools' players without having any of their own stolen.
But that's tomorrow's phlegmfest. For now, we have 12 teams including the eight newbies no one asked for competing for a championship they cannot win, in a new tournament round we are all but explicitly told not to care about. That's the only part of the plan America agrees on, by the way—the part where we don't care about a 17-win SEC team "making the field." It's just taking the NIT and kicking it up one stage, and only one stage, for only one weekend, all for some additional gambling/television inventory and "a modest profit," otherwise known in financial circles as "modest profit, my ass."
Is this an outrage? Not really, not in this poopslide of a national moment. Hell, if you went to Auburn, who won this year's NIT, it's probably cool because what's more fun than finishing 65th, or next year, 77th? It's just one more instance of favor-trading and deal-making between powerful actors who don't really care what people want, and which those people are under no obligation to care about. The problem with that, of course, is that the number of such things is growing—this is mostly a sadder version of the midseason NBA tournament, and not nearly as good as the Carabao Cup. It is an unusually stupid time to be a sports fan, but a great moment for those whose business is making silly little plaster-and-gravel sombreros and fedoras for the cows to wear.
To their minimal credit at least, those competitions at least phony up a trophy. The expanded NCAA Tournament fields just add to to the list of schools that won't come close to touching one. Worse, it suggest that the NCAA views the bowl system as an admirable model; this amounts to the basketball version of resuscitating the Bluebonnet Bowl, and then making six of them. As an overarching growth strategy, this is like Pizza Hut expanding its brand by putting more outlets deep in the woods. But we guess you never know when you need a pepperoni-and-olive while sitting in a duck blind at dawn. And when you do, there will be one a shotgun's length away, at least until Pizza Hut realizes that sending someone out in waders and a camouflage jacket to deliver one pizza per year is not a business strategy.
