Thursday, April 22, 2010

Breathing a Sigh of Relief

According to the press release from the NCAA, CBS and Turner, the NCAA tournament will undergo an expansion to 68 teams starting next year. This is a good move, especially in comparison to the looming 96-team concept. I'm sure years down the road, 96 teams will be a good idea, but not today. Not when the 65-team bracket was fine the way it was.

No official word yet on any format changes, but with 68 teams, presumably the bottom 8 teams (the 15 and 16 seeds of today) will have to play on opening round day, which is still unfair since they qualified for the tourney while a middle-of-the-road major conference team that barely makes it in gets to play in the "real" tournament.

With the basketball tournament moving forward relatively unchanged, we can move on to presentation. They're adding three networks (TNT, TBS, and truTV, which used to be Court TV if I'm not mistaken) to cover the tourney so that every game is televised. My hope is that CBS will continue to produce the tourney a la the Masters when ESPN televises the early rounds. Watching Turner personalities cover a tournament where they don't even show any regular-season games is a bad idea.

No comments: