Exapansion Will Mess with Perfection

Expansion Will Mess With Perfection

How can the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament be described? In its early beginnings, it could be said to be a game of small gyms, tiny budgets, pioneering coaches and university and network officials who were deeply suspicious of the intrusion of television into their fiefdom (Einhorn, vi). Now it’s the total opposite. It has become a cultural phenomenon played in huge arenas, with astronomical budgets, and multibillion dollar contracts with television networks. However, no matter what era the game has been played in. it stirs emotions in people because what it has come to represent to its fans.

Mike Kryzewski, Duke University’s Basketball Coach for the past thirty years, goes as far to say that it is a “national treasure”. As he states, “It unifies us for the month of March the way we’re not unified at any other time of the year. It brings teams and people together from small towns and big cities, rural areas and urban ones…People fill out their brackets, everybody talks about it—even those who don’t follow basketball—and there’s just such a spirit about it. It’s the spirit of the underdog, but it’s also the values and traditions of the game. It’s pure, and it’s followed with such an enthusiasm that I don’t see happening anywhere else” (Einhorn, pg147).

Those are some deep sentiments, but I agree that it stirs emotions because the way CBS and the NCAA have marketed it. When CBS was trying to make it its own in 1999 after purchasing the tournament from NBC, it not only thought of “Selection Sunday”, but also “The Road to the Final Four”. This helped fans know the stories of the teams and the journey teams took to get to the tournament( ). Right now that journey means something because the Selection Committee looks at a team’s record to see if they are good enough to get in. Generally, out of 27 games played, a team has to win at least 20 games. George Dohrman, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated and the last...