Expanding NCAA tournament is inevitable insanity

This weekend brings us the joy of Selection Sunday, the gateway to March Madness, which leads to the Sweet Sixteen, the Elite Eight and the Final Four. But these days Sports Nation is riled up -- and I mean RILED UP -- over the prospect that the idyllic 65-team NCAA men's basketball tournament might soon expand to 96 schools.

Or, as it would be called in college hoops parlance, the Needless Ninety-Six.

Reaction to the possibility of the first major increase of the NCAA tournament field in 25 years has been somewhere between apoplectic and apocalyptic.

First and foremost, a 96-team field would make it very, very, very, very, very, very, very difficult for office-pool tournament brackets to fit onto a single page. Of course, this point is somewhat negated by the fact that almost everyone in America, at the moment, is out of work.

Second and foremost, a 96-team field would entail an entire extra weekend of play and make it very, very, very, very, very, very, very difficult for student-athletes to keep up with their academic load. Of course, this point is somewhat negated by the fact that most Division I basketball players don't actually have an academic load.

Let me just assure a skittish public as best I can: We're going to be okay. We really are.

But apparently -- and I didn't realize this until countless sports columnists and bloggers pointed it out in recent weeks -- 65 is the magic number for March Madness.

At its origin -- from 1939 to 1950 -- the NCAA tournament had eight teams. What was wrong with that? Aren't many Bowl Championship Series critics proposing an eight-team college football playoff?

From eight teams the tournament went to 16 for two years and eventually settled at 25 for a while. Then the field kept growing -- to 32, 40, 48, 52, 53, 64 and, finally, in 2001, 65.

(Incidentally, we are in the midst of ESPN's "Championship Week" -- better known in Jay Bilas's house as "Where's Daddy?" -- featuring 177 men's and women's conference tournament games in an 11-day period on ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPN on ABC, ESPN360.com, ESPN Full Court, ESPN Mobile TV, ESPN Radio or ESPN International. I can't even fathom how many Stanley 8-Outlet Power Strips are currently in operation in Bristol.)

Purists always decry postseason expansion; to this day, Bob Costas develops a neck rash every time he hears the expression "baseball wild-card playoff race."

Yet if you live in America long enough -- and I'm getting there -- you come to realize that everything expands. You also realize that it's always about money, and in sports, the money comes from television. So, frankly, a combination of Darwinian evolution and Draconian economics would lead the NCAA to seek even more billions of dollars from CBS, or another TV partner.