What makes the big dance so special? Pretend it’s the greatest party of your life that you would have no business attending otherwise. Let’s say you are invited to spend New Years with Jay-Z, Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Bono, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, and a host of other characters that anyone who reads this blog is not nearly cool enough to hang out with. Now imagine you RSVP, a driver comes and picks you up from the airport—that’s right, your so damn awesome a score of mega celebrities paid for you to fly to LA’s most exclusive club first class so you could get wasted on with them on Cristal (Note: I’m not sure if this is how you properly spell Cristal, Chrystal Crystal, Khrystal, because I’ve never nor will I likely ever drink it). Anyway the party is everything you hoped for; it is a historic moment in the timeline that is your existence. You converse with LeBron and Jay-Z about the 2010 free agent period. You make out sloppily with Lady Gaga in the corner while Tiger Woods yells, “this dude is like a young me, before my entire legacy unraveled!!!” You think Lady Gaga really likes you, she seems to lead you on, but rebuffs your effort to have her accompany you back to your suite in the really nice hotel your staying in that puts chocolate mint candies on the pillow. (THAT DAMN POKER FACE!!!!)
This is the greatest night of your life, but you earned your right to go to the party of the century. You busted your ass all season long, played a ridiculously hard non-conference schedule, took shit from Joe Lunardi, who looks like an elf and has never played more than five seconds of basketball without reaching for an inhaler. You took care of business in the conference season, sure there were a couple of questionable losses, but those were on the road. Seriously, road games are hard. You did reasonably well against the RPI top 50 and beat Kansas State in the Trojan Condoms Aruba Preseason Slam Jam. That’s a damn good win, especially when you count the Frank Martin scariness factor. Anyway, you go to the Big Dance win in the first round game, but get bounced in the second by the two seed. It’s ok. Evan Turner is superhuman.
The following year you make it back, but now the party isn’t so exclusive. There aren’t just 65 special guests along with the host of celebrity invites; there are almost one hundred of you. You can’t find Jay-Z, or anyone else worth talking to because the super exclusive club is too crowded. You can’t move. It’s overkill. It’s not fun. Why even come? The party last year was so perfect, now your rewarded with some overcrowded crap. What is this NBA? Are we inviting everyone to the playoffs? Is this fourth grade recess where we have to let everyone play? Do we all get participation awards? (Note: Participation awards are for losers, if you are proud of receiving a participation award kill yourself. Seriously.) Half of these teams had sub .500 conference records. You don’t want to party with them. Fucking losers. They belong at home.
The point is there is a feeling of exclusivity and accomplishment in making the field of 65. When you invite 96 teams the tournament is cheapened. You can say true basketball fans want more teams, more games to watch, an extension of the unofficial holiday that is March Madness. True college hoops junkies want the best competition to be on the floor. They want to see upsets and when they do happen for them to actually mean something. They don’t want the field to be watered down. I don’t want to have the 15-2 match be corrupted because the 15 now has to play 17-14 UConn and may likely not make it to the real first round at all. Now there is no official format for this theoretical expansion so you can’t make up formats that would give berth to different scenarios, but expansion just turns the tournament into a clusterfuck of mediocrity. I know proponents of expansion (Perry, see his previous blog post below) say they watch the tournament to see upsets, not who wins the championship and I understand that idea. However if you make the tournament so large to force the upsets it cheapens the upset. You’re an upset slut Perry!! You should have to work for the upset. Pursue it. Take it out to dinner. Get to know it. You can’t just have a ton of extra teams show up and try to force glass slippers onto their feet.
Now I know some people say expansion would kill the NIT and they have a point, but I’m not taking that angle because the NIT sucks and I don’t watch it now with 65 teams. However the conference tournaments would die. The week before selection Sunday is so super fantastic. We get to listen to Raftery Bilas and Shulman at 1 pm on a Friday or on the deuce you can check out Baylor, Texas A&M and the Knight Musberger sweater brigade. This year we have seen teams like Minnesota, Notre Dame, even Rhode Island when they beat St. Louis play with a sense of urgency, intensity that brought their level of play to a new level. This quality of basketball would disappear in the conference tournaments would disappear because any team with a legitimate chance of making an unexpected run to play themselves into the tournament in the Big East or Big Ten would be in the field of 96 already. I don’t want college basketball to turn into the NBA where we have teams dog it for two thirds of the regular season and just play hard at the end. If it aint broke don’t fix it. March Madness rules. Simply making it is something special for many schools. March Madness is so great it makes the gayest award ever mean something. The big dance is the greatest party in the world. Why? Because we’d all kill to just get a participation award. If there were 96 teams I wouldn’t want it.
Also filling out the bracket would be killer. We’d all have to go to kinkos and get special elongated paper just to fit all the teams on.
No comments:
Post a Comment