"Expanding tournament would help MAC teams."

[Tricky_Falcon]

Expanding tournament would help MAC teams


Not sure I agree. The NCAA would find a way to exclude the MAC and we aren't exactly in position to demand anything with the product on the court.

[VDub26Falcon]

I am 1,000,000,000% against expanding the NCAA Tournament...the conference tournaments act as the first few rounds and that is good enough for me. Three weeks of bracket watching is awesome and the first weekend of Madness is the absolute best!!!

[doughash]

Best-case scenario the MAC would get one more bid along with a bunch of .500 teams from the power conferences. I prefer the current system.

[cph2133]

Yea, I call BS on this one.

Just like in bowl games in football. the ratio would be 9:1 "BCS" conference schools:mid-majors that get spots in the tournament/bowl games.

Sure it may mean one more team gets in on good year (a 20+ win team like Akron was a few years ago), but other than that teams like Notre Dame, Providence, Ole Miss, Miss State would get the extra spots.

I'd be okay with expanding the tournament and making it so regular season champs AND conference tourney champs get bids (. That'd be okay with me, and in fairly common instances, conferences like the MAC, MAAC, SoCon would get two teams into the dance.

[It's the Journey...]

The problem is not with the number of teams that get in the NCAA tournament; it is in how those teams are evaluated all season long. Because there is not an absolute formula it is easy to give the power conferences the nod. We need to get a system in place that evaluates ALL teams the same way. A low end big conference team should not be rated over a high end small conference team just because of the conference. If we can get some consistency in that area then the problem of who gets in and who gets out will take care of itself. Right now the ONLY expansion I would support would be going to 68 teams. If we can have 1 play-in game then why can't we have 1 in each region?

[falconman]

I didn't know if anyone saw this or not, but it was in the Wall Street Journal today..

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... re_twitter" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[MarkL]

I'm calling BS on this one too. This article is from the Columbus Dispatch. They care about one school and one school only: THE Ohio State University.

Truthfully, a 96 team tournament would help a .500 OSU team more than it would a 25 win MAC team. Just like we've seen time and time again in big sports, when an event (NCAA tournament, BCS bowl) requires an invite, the smaller schools only get invited when the rules require it and often get the shaft even when invited (one or two bids to most smaller conferences in NCAA tournament, Boise and TCU both being required to get BCS bowls so they play each other, giving #22 Bowling Green women's bball #13 seed in 2006, ...).

Toss this article out the window. It's junk. And while you're at it, keep the tournament as is.