I'm a Willow Glen Dad and I like sports....

I know what you're thinking: "Great, another reject with a blog that thinks his opinions matter". Yup, that's pretty much it. What makes me qualified to write about sports? Absolutely nothing. I don't work in sports, I don't have any insider knowledge and I never laced them up (unless high school golf counts). I do like sports, watch a lot of sports and I have pretty strong (and perhaps educated) opinions about the sports I like. Thanks to the internet, and more specifically the ability to create a blog in 25 seconds, I can write about sports and there's really nothing anyone can do about it.

So, on with the sports.
You'll find out more about my sports allegiances as I write but I'll rank my sports in level of enjoyment for you. From the big 4 (if hockey even counts as big anymore) I'd rank them pro baseball, pro football, college football, college basketball, hockey and pro basketball. I'll watch other sports as well (especially golf) but my sports brain mostly concentrates on the big 4. Living in San Jose I've caught a bit of "Sharks Fever" and my love for hockey has grown over the past 2 years. This year it make overtake my love for college basketball (it kind of already has considering I've watched more hockey than college basketball) but we'll see how that goes once tournament time comes.
The NCAA tournament is probably my favorite sporting event of the year. Every year I get together with my brother for the first weekend of the tournament. For a few years we went to the closest arena that had 1st and 2nd round games. It was a great time but it got a little expensive. So, lately we've been just getting together, taking Thursday and Friday off, locking ourselves in a room with beer and junk food and watching as many of the 48 games as we can. We usually have our regional game on the main TV plus 2 laptops running games as well (by the way I love the NCAA for broadcasting all it's games online for free). It's like my second Christmas and Santa may be adding more presents under the tree.

This week the NCAA met to discuss expanding the tournament. Apparently there are 347 division 1 basketball teams and everyone wants to figure out how more teams can get in on some tournament action (thus get in on some of that tournament money). Does this mean I'll have to take off the entire week now to catch the entire tourney? Will I now gain 20 lbs instead of 10? I'm intrigued. However I think expansion is a bad idea.

Some have suggested taking it up to 68 and playing 4 play-in games instead of 1. If that's what happens the NCAA is just making a joke of itself. The only people who watch the play-in game are degenerate gamblers, parents of the players too cheap to go to the game and maybe students from the universities playing. Who cares who wins so they can lose to the number one overall seed in the tournament? When they release the brackets after Selection Sunday you fill it out before they even play the play-in game. No one says "I'm not picking yet because I want to know who Kansas is playing from the play-in game".

Another idea has been expanding the tournament to 96 teams (basically absorbing the NIT). Do we really need more teams with 10+ losses than we already have? Do you remember who won the NIT last year? I don't. I had to look it up. Turns out it was the basketball power that is Penn State and they beat Baylor. Would the tournament have been better with those teams in it? Maybe a game or two, but neither of these teams was going anywhere. I understand that over 50% of all D1 college football teams make it to the post season but football also has D1AA (or whatever they call it now). Why can't basketball adopt the same structure and have two tournaments? If they really want to add more competitive teams to the tourney why not get rid of the rule that allows the .500 team, that got hot at the end of the season and won their conference tournament (against superior teams that aren't going to let their star players get hurt before the big dance), to get an automatic bid into tournament of 64? If the conference tournament brings in big money then still have them but make the teams have a better than .500 record to play in it. This would at least open up 4-5 slots a year for teams that probably deserve to be in the tournament.

The only reason that I want to see more teams in the tournament is to potentially extend the 4 days of bliss that is the first weekend. Overall I think it's a bad idea. 64 (I mean 65) just feels like enough teams and extending it will probably just dilute the talent in the tournament that much more. However, if they do expand the tournament, I'll still watch the entire first weekend, even if it means taking a full week off of work.

Thanks for reading.