Shanoff’s Wake-Up Call: Create a Bigger Dance

By Dan Shanoff
Today’s Calls: Championship Week vs. Expanding the NCAA Tournament, Portland State vs. Mount St. Mary’s, Rockets vs. the Lakers and Celtics, Chris Paul vs. Tim Duncan, Yankees vs. Rays, Tony Stewart vs. Goodyear, Bobby Knight vs. Your Boss and More!
The Opening Pitch: Expand the NCAA Tournament. To all 340 teams.
Championship Week could be SO much better. The first half of the week – small-conference title mania – is awesome; power conference tournaments are kind of a waste.
After a full regular season, all but a handful of at-large bids are accounted for. And most power conference tournaments’ auto-bids are won by teams that would have earned them through an at-large bid anyway.
Here is a better alternative:
Replace the week of conference tournaments by expanding the NCAA Tournament from 64 teams to all 340. I have made the case every year for more than a decade, and I’ll do it again now. Here’s how it would work:
At the end of the regular season, the top 32 teams (as picked by the Selection Committee) earn byes into the Big Dance, regardless of conference affiliation. The remaining 308 teams are seeded into a bracket: the “Bigger Dance.”
Within four rounds of games (the same four games most small-league champs play to earn their NCAA bid anyway), you cut that group down to 32, seeded with the top 32 into the tried-and-true 64-team bracket.
It is cleaner than the existing selection process. There is no “Bubble,” because everyone is included. The first stage creates weird and wild geographic and inter-conference match-ups between small-conference sleepers and power-conference pansies -- upsets galore.
The incentive to do well in the regular season is to get into that Top 32 and get the bye week; the 32 who survive the 309-team scrum have their own advantage -- serious momentum heading into the Big Dance.
There has been talk about expanding the NCAA Tournament by a few teams -- it’s a half-measure that really won’t solve anything. There will always be a bubble; there will always be complaints.
Unless you let everyone in.
The result would be an even more exciting tournament and an ultimately more worthy champ. Everything that makes the NCAA Tournament great and Championship Week great... rolled into one event: The Bigger Dance.
Madness you may have missed last night:
Portland State! There aren’t many things in sports that are cooler than a team making the NCAA Tournament for the first time.
Mount St. Mary’s! Talk about balance – four Mountaineers scored in double figures to get them in for the first time since ‘99.
No auto-bids today or tonight, but a ton of NCAA seed-jockeying and Bubble-foisting as power conference tournaments ramp up, from the ACC to the SEC to the Pac-10 to the Big Ten to the Big 12 to the Big East.
(In yesterday’s notable results: Syracuse will do well in the NIT... Cal won, earning that rematch with UCLA after last weekend’s crazy ending... Arizona needs a run, and advancing to beat Stanford is a start... Today’s most intriguing game: Dayton-Xavier in the A-10 quarters.)
Rockets win 20th straight: It ties the 2nd-longest win streak in NBA history, and they are only the 3rd team to win 20 straight. Wow.
Houston’s upcoming schedule is intriguing: They should beat the Bobcats in Houston for 21...
Then they host Kobe Bryant and the Lakers on Sunday in a nationally televised game -- and you know Kobe wants to snap that streak...
And even if they survive that, the Rockets get the Celtics on Tuesday night, again at home in Houston and again on national TV.
(To illustrate how awesome the Rockets’ streak is: The Celtics have won 10 straight, and it’s like “Meh.”)
More NBA Last Night: Some wins just feel so affirming, like the Hornets beating the Spurs by 25 behind CP3’s 26 and 17.
MLB Spring Training: Yankees-Rays brawl. That Duncan spikes-first slide into Iwamura’s crotch should get him suspended, as should Heath Phillips’ first-inning plunk of Rays uber-rookie Evan Longoria.
Here’s the crazy part: No matter what, the Rays win. A few seasons ago, you couldn’t get the Yankees to acknowledge the Rays even existed; now the Yankees are treating them as if their name was the “Ray Sox.”
The Rays recognized the first rule of feuding: Always punch up a weight class. (Admittedly, they only had one direction to go, but they chose well in picking baseball’s most storied franchise.)
Now, if Billy Crystal had jumped off the bench and entered the fray, THAT would have been something for the Yankees...
Francisco Liriano Watch: 53 pitches to get through 2 innings? I know he was going against the patient Red Sox, but that’s not good.
NASCAR: Tony Stewart shouldn’t be expecting that Goodyear endorsement any time soon. Here’s a ringing endorsement: “[The] most pathetic racing tire I’ve ever been on in my professional career.”
What makes this fascinating is that message discipline, as it relates to official sponsors, is arguably NASCAR’s No. 1 asset.
NFL: Broncos oust GM Ted Sundquist. His good: Champ Bailey. His bad: Javon Walker. His legacy: Jay Cutler.
Needless to say, David Carr, the Giants’ new backup to Eli Manning, would not have pulled off a miracle win in the Super Bowl against the Pats last month.
NHL: Ovechkin Watch! He scored 2 goals last night (55, 56), including the game-winner.
The question isn’t whether Maya Moore’s recruitment to UConn was iffy because of a tour of ESPN; the question is how often UConn took ANY recruit over to ESPN.
CBB Awards Follow-Up: My esteemed colleague Mike DeCourcy e-mailed to remind me that while I’m nicking SN CBB POY Tyler Hansbrough for choking in the NCAA Tournament, my POY Kevin Love had his own championship-game choke -- last season as a senior in high school.
Bobby Knight makes his debut as a TV analyst. I’ve read praise of him for being “outspoken,” but here was his gist: Conference tournaments were once terrible, but now he thinks they’re not that bad. Ooh: Don’t sugarcoat it, Coach!
The Last Word: Is your boss going to block your access to the first two days of the NCAA Tournament via streaming video? That’s why you have sick days, people.
That said: Is there a more fan-friendly application of Web technology than complete real-time video access (even the local game!) to the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament?
Remember the mid-‘90s, when just having a scoreboard page that refreshed every 30 seconds was life-changing?
Dan Shanoff writes The Wake-Up Call every weekday morning for SportingNews.com and blogs daily at DanShanoff.com. Got any comments, questions or feedback? Email Dan at shanofftsn-[at]-gmail-[dot]-com.
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