Column: NCAA tourney should not bust its own bracket

This past weekend exemplified what is best about the NCAA tournament. You had the consensus No. 1 team, Kansas, knocked out in the second round by no-name Northern Iowa, who reached the Sweet 16 along with a host of other upset teams, including Ivy League champ Cornell. But there are still enough well-known teams — like Duke, Kentucky and Syracuse — alive to make the final rounds interesting and keep the networks happy.

I know that saying good things about favored teams is often anathema, but stay with me. Everyone loves upsets, since it’s fun to see the scrappy underdog beat the basketball goliath every once in a while. But would you really want to watch a Final Four of Saint Mary’s, Murray State, Montana and Lehigh? I think not. As much as everyone loves upsets, you need the powerhouse schools to maintain interest in the tournament. This year we have a great balance of upsets and traditional schools remaining in the tournament, making for a compelling Sweet 16 and hopefully Final Four.

You and me would probably say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” It might shock you to hear that recently there’s been talk of fixing the NCAA tournament by expanding it to 96 teams and essentially creating a full round of play-in games. Why, you might ask, would the NCAA want to mess with its biggest success story?

Here’s the simple answer: money. It’s pretty much an open secret that college sports are all about money these days, with the biggest example being the BCS for college football, and it should be no surprise to astute observers that money is driving this argument as well. The only surprise could be the fact that it is the supposedly benevolent NCAA, not the cartel-like BCS, that is driving the push for expansion.

Ideas like this have been floating around for years — even for expansion to 128 teams — but they carry an extra potency this year, because the NCAA can choose to opt out of its multi-billion-dollar television contract with CBS if it so chooses. This means that it can renegotiate a new deal with a network, and having more games would certainly be an attraction to a television partner like, say, ESPN.

Obviously, more games would mean more money for the NCAA, which generates 90 percent of its entire income from the basketball tournament, so there is a huge financial incentive to expand.

For once, though, the NCAA should stop thinking about its own coffers and focus on what would be important to basketball as a whole.

Adding 32 teams to the tournament would be essentially the same as amalgamating the once-famous NIT with today’s NCAA tournament.

Does a 19-15 Texas Tech team that went 4-12 in the Big 12 deserve to have a chance at an NCAA title? How about the 18-16 UNC team that everybody joked about with their friends, the one that went 5-11 in the ACC this year? Should it be in the Big Dance? Of course not.

But it made the NIT this year, meaning that in a 96-team tournament it would almost certainly be invited.

As ESPN’s Andy Katz says, this essentially celebrates mediocrity.

Being invited to the NCAA championship should be an honor reserved for teams that have good seasons.

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Finishing two games above .500 because of a bunch of cream-puff matchups should not be a ticket to the tournament.

Why even bother playing the regular season or the conference tournament at all when you know that almost every major conference team essentially has an automatic berth in the Big Dance?

The sport should instead realize that the gap between big-conference and small-conference schools has changed and adjust its seeding and selection process accordingly. Instead of giving an at-large bid to Notre Dame, who proved to be merely average, give it to a deserving mid-major team.

Some argue for the tournament’s expansion because of the proliferation of bowl games in college football.

This is a sorely misguided argument, as the multitude of bowl games has ruined the mystique of New Year’s Day. An argument based on the long and storied tradition of such bowls as the Meineke Car Care Bowl and the PapaJohns.com Bowl is pretty much a joke.

No one cares about them — people only care about the traditional Rose, Sugar, Fiesta and Orange bowls, along with a few second-tier bowls like the Capital One and Cotton bowls.

The example set by college football is exactly what college basketball should be avoiding.

Besides, a 96-team bracket would be ridiculous.