George Mason didn't heal college basketball, at least not from the inside. The Patriots' run from the NCAA Tournament bubble to the Final Four excited fans and attracted television viewers, but it had a different effect on the game's foundation.
It scared the biggest schools. And it galvanized the small ones.
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| Bruce Weber says the success of mid-majors has caused quite a stir. (Getty Images) |
As a group, college basketball's biggest schools have only embraced the smaller schools as sparring partners, someone to be bloodied in the pursuit of national championships. Because of that, the majors and the mid-majors have never gotten along. Never have, never will. There's too much pride and money -- mostly money -- at stake.
But now it's getting contentious.
"We've created a lot of interest in that topic," George Mason coach Jim Larranaga said.
You can see it in the sudden move -- triggered by the biggest schools -- to expand the NCAA Tournament from 65 teams to a number closer to 80. It's no coincidence that in the same season the Big East grew to an unrealistic 16 teams and the NCAA Tournament invited more mid-majors than ever, Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim began lobbying for expansion.
The rest of the Big East and the game's biggest conferences have had Boeheim's back, saying at various league meetings this spring that college basketball has outgrown the tournament's 65-team field.
"Everyone is alarmed," Illinois coach Bruce Weber told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "The success of the mid-majors backed the committee's decisions. Now if they have a choice between a mid-major or high-level team, it's probably going to be the mid-major that gets in. So it's not a surprise that the big guys are clamoring."
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The biggest mid-majors support expansion, too, but not with the zeal of the majors; leagues like the Missouri Valley and Colonial are starting to break through for multiple bids, with or without expansion. George Mason made it to the Final Four. Wichita State and Bradley reached the Sweet 16. UW-Milwaukee and Montana reached the second round.
The smaller leagues -- the bottom third of college basketball -- aren't happy about expansion at all. They know expansion would mean more bids for the ACC's sixth-best team or the Big Ten's No. 7 finisher, not more bids for the Southern Conference or Ohio Valley runner-up.
Additionally, expansion would mean another layer of play-in games. Which teams would get stuck in that already unpopular event? The lowest seeds, from leagues like the Northeast and Mid-Continent. For those leagues, tournament expansion ultimately would mean tournament shrinkage. Hello, Dayton. Goodbye, actual NCAA Tournament.
But the rift goes deeper than the makeup of NCAA Tournament.
As the biggest leagues have done for years, colluding to control the game and ultimately its $6 billion NCAA Tournament contract (through CBS), the mid-majors are finally beginning to think and act as a group.
Already two mid-major leagues -- the MAC and the Ohio Valley -- have decided not to sell themselves to the highest bidder for "guarantee games," which for years have tilted the balance of power toward the biggest leagues. Guarantee games are essentially bought victories, and the money (and victories) only flow in one direction.
For example, a big school from the SEC pays a small school from the SWAC a fee in the neighborhood of $40,000 -- the guarantee -- to play one game on the SEC team's court. According to research by his staff, Larranaga says the home team won roughly 95 percent of the guarantee games played during the 2004-05 season.
With a 5 percent win rate and the crushing impact that has on a conference's RPI, why would smaller schools continue to serve themselves up on a platter to the majors that are trying to take their spot in the NCAA Tournament?
"If ACC teams play six guarantee games each, that's 72 games and they're likely to go something like 68-4," said Larranaga, who favors NCAA Tournament expansion. "It means that league is going to have a tremendous RPI."
For leagues like the SWAC and America East, whose basketball programs arguably couldn't survive unless they sold losses to the highest bidder, guarantee games are a necessary evil.
But for the bigger mid-majors -- now that the NCAA Tournament selection committee has begun to award multiple bids to their leagues -- guarantee games have become more of a hindrance than a help. Which is why league officials from the Missouri Valley, Colonial and Horizon are considering following the lead of the MAC and OVC, and urging their memberships to quit selling itself to win-hungry and money-bloated majors.
Smaller schools also are bristling under the leadership of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, the profession's governing body that is closer to the U.S. Senate than the House of Representatives -- an elite and misrepresentative group, in other words.
The NABC represents more than 1,000 schools at all levels of basketball, with less than 10 percent of those schools in the major Division I category. However, the NABC's Board of Directors counts 13 of its 21 members (62 percent) from major schools. One of the NABC's purposes, according to its website, is "to unify coaches on issues pertaining to basketball at all levels."
Making better choices as NABC president -- the programs of several past NABC leaders, including Kelvin Sampson, Eddie Sutton, Denny Crum and Mike Jarvis, have been found guilty of recruiting violations -- would help.
There is much to unify. The NABC had better get started. Giving more of a voice to smaller schools -- or stifling the majors, whatever -- would be a good place to start.
