On the final Saturday of February, which brought us perilously close to March, the college basketball teams from Utah, Villanova, Texas A&M, Iowa, Drake, Virginia Tech, Butler, Cincinnati and Mississippi all were defeated, by an average margin of 17 points. The drive to reach the NCAA Tournament inspired not a single one toward excellence.
To be fair, that does not comprise the entire population of the March Madness “bubble”, but it is telling that just about the only teams in that neighborhood to win over the weekend were facing others in the same circumstance. There are no ties in basketball, so someone laboring to reach the NCAA field had to get the W.
If certain (really powerful) college athletics administrators had their way, though, they’d all be in.
Every last one of them.
Emphasizing the word “last”.
MORE: Projecting the men’s 2024 field | Women’s 2024 field
Since the field was grown to 64 teams in the 1984-85 season, which was not long after the whole of the event became available on television nationally, the NCAA Tournament has grown well beyond what would seem to be the established boundaries of the sport for which it crowns a champion. The audience for the men’s college basketball regular season widely is underestimated –…
