Word: ncaa
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...first NCAA men's basketball tournament, held back in 1939, had only eight teams. What a boring bracket. America's obsession with college basketball has helped the tournament, more colloquially known as March Madness, grow into a 65-team sports celebration. Every year die-hard fans and clueless cubicle dwellers alike navigate the maze of March Madness seeding brackets trying to predict the winner in their office pools. Last March, President Obama's bracket received as much scrutiny as his economic policies. The tournament season has grown so mad, in fact, that a cottage industry has sprouted around...
Bracketology has expanded beyond basketball too. For example, a 2007 book called The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything used the NCAA-tournament format to rank a wide range of minutiae, from cooking tools to hairstyles to animated characters. Bart Simpson outlasts Homer in a stirring first-round matchup, and in the video-game tournament, Tetris beats Zelda to take the title. No upsets there...
Staring down Cal Poly’s Chase Pami in the 157 lb. finals at the NCAA Wrestling Championships, O’Connor had one opponent left between him and an elusive national title. Amid all the added fanfare that comes with college wrestling’s biggest stage, the Crimson co-captain emerged from his match on Saturday night at the Qwest Center in Omaha, Neb. just as he had always envisioned—victorious...
...blame the NCAA for looking after its finances. After all, college sports are a big-time business. And, proponents of expansion say, fans will soon get used to the bigger field. "Every time you had the tournament expanded, you had a lot of people who were against it," says CBS analyst Greg Anthony, who was point guard for the 1990 UNLV team that won the national title. "But ultimately, it proved to be the right decision." College basketball moved from a 53-team tournament to a 64-team event in 1985. "I love the tournament now," says Anthony. "I loved...
Despite such noble sentiments, expanding the tournament would still be a mistake. Sure, the NCAA could squeeze a few extra dollars out of the 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...