Hoop Dreams (for Some)
Tomorrow the two top-rated Men’s collegiate basketball programs in the country all year – Gonzaga and Baylor – will fittingly square off in the Final. They will be seeking to capture the 81st NCAA Men’s Basketball championship that was first awarded in 1938 to the University of Oregon. (The women were not afforded an opportunity to play for a championship until 44 years later!). Few remember that at the inception and throughout the 1930’s and 40’s it was the NIT, not the NCAA, that was actually considered college basketball’s premier post-season tournament. The Temple Owls took home that first championship and the local squad St. Louis University, led by “Easy” Ed McCauley, took home the title in 1948.
Much has changed since the early years of the NCAA when a mere eight teams were invited from each of eight separate national regions. Today, the Men’s Division 1 basketball tournament singlehandedly supports the very existence of the NCAA. About 80% of the NCAA’s total revenues for the year comes from the TV and marketing rights from this tournament alone. (Many may be surprised that the NCAA itself yields virtually no income from college football.)
The tournament is also a cash cow for the teams that are selected and the conferences from where they came. Just being selected, without winning a single game, puts a couple of million dollars in the “educational” coffers, a round of 16 appearance triples that, and a Final Four run is worth well over $8 Million per team (though some Conferences require that the money be shared with all teams in the conference). The players share of that pot is, of course, ZERO – an issue that is currently being hotly contested before the U.S. Supreme Court.
While every year produces its shares of upsets with some #12 and #13 seeds from smaller conferences beating their larger highly-financed counterparts from major educational institutions, this year saw an unprecedented avalanche of Davids over Goliaths. In the first round #15 seed Oral Roberts, the gold-towered evangelical school from Tulsa with an enrollment of less than 3500, took down one of the largest and cockiest schools in the country, #2 seeded “The” Ohio State (the only University whose students and alumni insist you add an article before its name); # 14 Abilene Christian defeated their states’ signature school, #3 Texas (albeit on a bogus foul with 1.2 seconds left); OSU’s much less heralded neighbor to the south, #13 Ohio University, beat last year’s National Champion, the University of Virginia; and #13 seeded North Texas State (one of seven schools from the Lone Start state to make the tournament) shocked #4 Purdue. In addition, two #11 seeds, Syracuse and UCLA, upset their 6th seeded opponents. Indeed, UCLA came within a last second charging foul of going all the way to the Final and seeking its record 12th title as the lowest seed ever to get that far. The cumulative seed number of the teams remaining after the first two rounds was the highest in NCAA history.
It was a particularly embarrassing tournament for the largest and most powerful conference, which proudly calls itself “the Big 10 ” even though it is composed of 14 teams. (I guess math is not a BIG focus at these institutions of higher learnin’ or they are not especially proud of some of their members- perhaps Nebraska?). The Big 10 managed to persuade the Selection Committee to pick 9 of its 14 teams (a whopping 64% of them!) for the tournament. That’s some serious bias going on there.
Even assuming the Big 10 was the best basketball conference this year, why should a team that barely had a winning record and had already proven incapable of beating most of the other teams in its own conference be given the special opportunity to compete for a National Championship (e.g. Wisconsin who went 15-12, including 10-10 in their conference and lost 6 of their last 8 games) over numerous teams that won more than 20 games and finished second or third, albeit in a smaller and less well-funded conference (e.g. Belmont, Louisiana Tech, Western Kentucky, Colorado State and ACU)? If that weren’t enough, the Committee seeded two Big 10 teams as #1 seeds and two as #2 seeds (with an additional team as a # 4 seed) giving these schools the great advantage of playing less accomplished opponents early and helping to ensure those teams’ success and, correspondingly, confirming the Committee’s great insight – a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But in a case of poetic justice, the Gods of basketball kicked the Selection Committee and the Big 10 in the gonads when every single team (sans Michigan) from “the greatest basketball conference the world has ever seen” were headed home after only the second round. And while the Big 10 was projected to have four of the best eight teams in the entire country by the Committee, not one of them even advanced to the Final Four! The second so-called best basketball conference in the country this year, the “Big” 12, was rewarded with 7 of its 12 teams making the tournament at the expense of other “less Big” colleges. All fared far worse than their high seed, except for finalist Baylor.
Perhaps the Selection Committee will finally recognize its bias for the bigger and wealthier schools and against the schools from smaller conferences and institute some serious changes to the process – like not allowing more than half the schools from a single conference to make the tournament (I would personally favor no more than 4-5 teams from any one conference).
Until last night’s exhilarating Overtime win by the Zags over UCLA (the single best college basketball game I’ve ever seen!), there have been surprisingly few games I would characterize as great sports viewing experiences. There have been some very talented teams that play a very sloppy brand of basketball- can you say Texas? And there has been a shortage of close games. The NCAA tournament is known for its last second “buzzer-beaters.” But of the 64 games played in the tournament before the Final Four, I can only recall two games where a team made a meaningful last second shot – Virginia Tech against Florida and Alabama against UCLA. And both of these dramatic baskets merely tied the game. Further, the teams that executed them were unable to carry that excitement and momentum to victory- each got blown out in the ensuing overtime, thereby lessening the importance of the miraculous shot .
But none of this has stood in the way of fan interest. Ratings are up significantly overall, 12%, with the Sweet 16 up 30%. (Contrast this with a NFL ratings decline of 7% this past year and a decline in World Series viewership by 32%). Undoubtedly a huge thanks for the popularity of the tournament is due to gambling. The NCAA Basketball Tournament has always been the most wagered-upon event of the year (aside from the stock market). Even before sports wagering became legal in nearly half the states, betting on the NCAA Tournament was widely accepted even among the most sanctimonious and religious. Just about every office in the country, and even charity and religious organization, has some kind of office pool offering the prospect of winning $ and publicly flaunting the archaic gambling laws in this nation. Indeed, I understand that over $10 Billion has been bet thus far on this year’s tournament, with one big game still to go.
And it has undoubtedly been a banner tournament for the nation’s sports books who always benefit from the plethora of underdogs and upsets as well as the proposition bets that sucker many into making future wagers at worse odds for the prospect of a “big’ win. Everyone seeks the big payout, and a good buddy of mine came ever so close to achieving it. From his account, he fell one barely-missed, game-ending 3 point shot (by the best 3-point shooter in college this year no less) from having Oral Roberts upset Arkansas and make it to the elite 8- which would have yielded him a payout of $14,000 on a $400 bet! He could have used a rosary from Sister Jean- the 101 year old Nun and good luck charm from Loyola Chicago.
A more impressive predictive performance (with fortunately a lot less $ at stake) came from my daughter who lives in the isolated mountains of Montana. Though she played basketball in high school, she never watches or even follows college basketball, and knew nothing about any of the teams or players other than their location in the draw and their seed. Not only did she manage to win our family tournament, but she did so in an absolute landslide, choosing 6 of the last 8 remaining teams (and she had ALL SIX of the non-obvious teams of Gonzaga and Baylor!) Not a single recognized college basketball expert I saw (from Bilas to Lunardi to the crew on CBS) managed to pick that many. There are no experts when it comes to this tournament.
