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Other basketball experts sincerely believe that a bigger tournament would allow deserving teams into the Big Dance. Hall of Famer John Thompson, the ex-Georgetown coach, was against the idea before he broadcast the finals of the Colonial Athletic Conference tournament, which pitted Old Dominion against William & Mary. "I wasn't sold on it until I saw how good those two teams were," says Thompson. "Those kids deserve to be in the tournament as much as anybody. I asked myself if I would want to play against them, and I said hell no." Old Dominion won that game and faces...
...television networks by adding an extra round of games. But schools could also lose money if an expanded tournament devalues the regular season to the point that they sell fewer tickets to those games, or if television networks don't pony up as much dough to broadcast battles in January and February. "I don't think it's good for the game," says Martelli, one of the few coaches who have come out against the expansion plan. "The beauty of college basketball is that Wisconsin vs. Indiana, on a Tuesday night in January, is full of vim and vigor...
...Even worse, as races became more staid, ratings declined and attendance dipped - and not all of it can be attributed to the recession. In 2009 attendance fell about 10%; this year's Feb. 14 Fox broadcast of the Daytona 500 was the lowest-rated Great American Race since 1991. "You can't watch these races without seeing swaths of empty seats in the superspeedways," says David Carter, executive director of the Sports Business Institute at the University of Southern California. (See the photo-essay "A Steam-Powered Car Sets a Land Speed Record...
Cable companies, not surprisingly, have resisted, asking why they should pay for content that's broadcast over the airwaves to non-cable subscribers for free. They say they already give companies like Disney, which owns ABC, plenty of money - Disney gets about $200 million a year from Cablevision alone, for the right to carry cable networks like ESPN and the Disney Channel. (ESPN is reputed to get $4 per month per subscriber, the highest of any cable channel.) And any increases in costs, they note, will likely be passed on to consumers...
Meanwhile, the colorful spats between companies with plenty of broadcast capacity will continue to flare up. Fox had a similar altercation with Time Warner Cable in New York City in December, when Fox threatened to pull all its broadcast and cable channels if the cable company didn't pony up more money. As more contracts come up for renewal, more standoffs are expected - although few with such a glamorous sacrificial lamb as the Oscars at stake...