96 isn’t 31 better for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, make what we have better.

Reports are swirling that the NCAA is close to expanding the field for the men’s basketball tournament to 96 teams from the current 65. The reason is money. The NCAA can opt out of the CBS contract after this season and try to get more money.

There are a few problems with the idea.

Bad Timing

First the timing is terrible. The CBS contract as it stands is fair for the current market. You can be sure the rights have been quietly shopped and TV execs are telling them they won’t out bid CBS in the current format. If you haven’t noticed, the economy is in rough shape right now and ads are hard to sell. That should be a major alarm bell. Recording and watching later is reducing the value of ads, except for sports where almost all viewership is live. If you can’t beat the current deal without changing the event, its a bad time to change. Wait out the economy and if a new format is the right move, sign a true blockbuster deal in two years.

Logistics

Go take a look at the ratings for the NCAA Tournament. This won’t be a shock, best viewership (other than the championship game) is on Sunday and Saturday followed by prime time on Thursday and Friday. The day games on Thursday and Friday have a lousy audience. Those day games are basically throw-away garbage for CBS. We currently play 16 games on Thursday and 16 more on Friday with about half during the work day. How do you make 96 work? Start on Tuesday and Wednesday? That’s a tall order with Selection Sunday. If you do that means 16 on Tuesday, 16, on Wednesday, 16 on Thursday, and 16 on Friday with half of the new content coming during the work day. The logical solution is to play the new round and the round of 64 on the current Thursday-Saturday format because you don’t want the top seeds sitting home for a week waiting to play. What happens to the round of 32? You can play it on Monday-Tuesday but then the Sweet 16 starts on Thursday. You can wait until Thursday and play two games a day Thursday-Sunday (ie. only one round that week) and then pick up like normal or you can do like Division II and play the round of 32 on the second week Thursday-Friday and the Sweet 16 on Saturday Sunday. The next week send the Great Eight to the Final Four site and play on Thursday, the Final Four on Saturday and championship on Monday.

The problem is you don’t gain many valuable games (prime time week night or week end games). You add 31 teams without adding a lot of value in comparison to the number of teams.

Bad for Mid-Majors

Part of the fun is seeing the so-called mid-major schools advancing. In a 96 team field that becomes harder to do. They will face a more rested 1-8 seed. The mid-majors may gain more bids and gain more wins, but they will be less likely to advance to the round of 32 and the Sweet 16. In football we have to contend with being labeled BCS and non-BCS or AQ and non-AQ, wait for the new terminology, “Bye” conferences and “First Round” conferences to designate the rich from the poor.

Who cares about the customer?

As we’ve seen with football and its two-team playoff, the customer is NEVER right in the world of intercollegiate athletics. The fans have been clear in football they want a playoff with most of that support apparently around a 16 team field. In a given season, there are questions about three or four teams not making the tournament field. In football the solution to the clamor over not giving a shot to the handful of teams capable of rolling off three or four wins to become champion is to hunker down and protect the status quo. In basketball the solution is to add ten times more teams to the field than the fans are discussing.

Who cares about highlighting the sport, the players, and the teams?

In the current March Madness a first round upset gets lost quickly in the frantic march to the Sweet 16 on opening weekend. Win in the first round and its one of the 48 games played those first four days. In a six day opening, that win is one of 80 games. The stories that make the early round interesting are buried in a tidal wave of games. The current tournament is 64 games with the play-in. Expand it and it becomes a 95 game event, it ends up having more games than a typical NBA playoff season with its best of seven format, except it is compressed into a smaller time frame.

A better way

If the desire is to make more money, then give television more prime time games. Rather than dumping the NIT into the NCAA field, improve the NIT.

For the NCAA Tournament, add a week while leaving it at 65. Play-in game on Wednesday with the play-in winner playing on Friday or Saturday. Take the 32 opening round games and play 6 games each on Thursday and Friday. All the games played during prime time with three early and three late games. That leaves 10 games for Saturday and 10 for Sunday with no more than three games going on at the same time (currently we have periods of four games) and no games during normal work hours on Thursday and Friday. Those opening round games get a week of discussion rather than a few minutes before having to talk about the many games coming up. One week later we play the round of 32. Play 2 games on Thursday, two more on Friday, six on Saturday and six on Sunday. Just as we have now, you get a week to talk about the Sweet 16. The rest of the tournament proceeds as always. For the media, the same number of games, but more time to write and talk about them. TV gets the same number of games but loses the unprofitable day games and gains two profitable weeknights and a profitable weekend of coverage.

For the NIT, first take a page from the women’s game. Guarantee that the team with the highest RPI in each conference that isn’t selected for the NCAA Tournament will be offered an NIT berth. Add 17 at-large teams for a 48 team event.

Next, bundle the NIT with the NCAA Tournament. If CBS wants to keep the NCAA Tournament, they have to buy the rights to the NIT. If they want to resell those rights to ESPN, or Fox Regional Sports Nets, put them on CBS College or sell them to local TV stations, that’s their call. If Disney wants to buy the whole bundle and run games on any mix of ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Classic, ESPNU, regional sports nets and local TV, that is their call.

Finally, make the NIT financially worth something. Currently it is basically a roughly break-even deal. Make sure the teams get their costs covered and then add a bonus. The NCAA awards one “unit” for every game other than the title game played in the NCAA Tournament each unit is worth about $200,000 and you keep a unit earned for six years. Award one-tenth of a unit per NIT game played and make it stick for six years. That works out about 2% of the total TV package and 8% of the money awarded by units. With more at stake, athletic departments would be less likely to bail out of the event making it stronger.