There are many thankless jobs in our country. After all, someone has to be the general manager for Terrell Owens' arena football team. But this March, the toughest gig going will belong to NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament Selection Committee chairman Jeff Hathaway. Chairing the committee means being a lightning rod under normal circumstances, but doing so for the newly expanded tournament is sleeping in a suit of armor atop a hill during a thunderstorm.
Hathaway is the bouncer to a once exclusive party that has broadened its invitation list. With the tournament in its second year of accepting 68 teams, the decisions this year are going to be brutal. Just three weeks into 2012, only four BCS conference teams are undefeated in conference play, and only five are winless. Perennial tournament candidates like Texas and Pittsburgh have stumbled out of the gate, and the selection committee will be lucky if they stumble their way out of tournament discussion.
And yet, while this year's prospective tournament field seems especially bunched toward mediocrity, it is a team from last season that will give the 2012 tournament selection committee fits. Darn those 2010-2011 VCU Rams.
Before VCU, the committee could at least pretend that the teams battling on the tournament's at-large margins were not ultimately relevant to its final outcome. Yes, we deduced that George Mason may well have been the last team into the 2006 tournament, but at least the veil of seeding flexibility brought some plausible deniability. The committee could always claim that it shuffled teams around once inside the safe confines of tournament admission, and we did not have to concern ourselves about how close a Final Four team came to not even being invited to Round One.
But not anymore. The new First Four is nauseating for any number of reasons, but it should leave this year's committee sickest of all now that we understand its significance.
In the gimmick's debut last year, the tournament pitted VCU against USC. This was one of only two games that opening Tuesday, and both teams, forced to play an extra play-in round, could not avoid the reality that they escaped the NIT by the slimmest of margins. Jay Bilas (and others) railed against the Rams' admission, yet two weeks later they faced Butler for the right to play in the season's ultimate game. All of a sudden, the gravity of cutting teams from the tournament field was inescapable.
There was a time when talent was more centralized and access to a national championship was more restricted. Even if the smallest conference champion was allowed into the field, class and seeding would surely see to it that a fluke champion was impossible. But slowly, David's warm blanket of invincibility has been unraveled, and there is very little “dead money” playing for March's highest stakes anymore.
Based on VCU's example, every team that feels snubbed by the tournament committee will be sure that it could have been the latest version of Shaka Smart's upstarts. And why not? There was a time when at-large bids were few (or none), and talented teams would circle a bid to the tournament like sharks around a baby seal. Now teams on the tournament periphery still circle, but they do so like bubbles around a drain, mostly without control of their destinies.
As Americans, we may value social mobility, but as college basketball fans, it makes life much more complicated. At least the BCS gets that right.
Instead, the tournament's wider doors devalue the accomplishments of the teams that qualify. After all, if VCU could get within a breath of a championship as one of the last teams in the tournament, don't the teams that finished just a hair behind the Rams have the right to believe they could have done the same if given a chance?
In a few weeks, the cliched bubble discussions will begin and teams barely holding .500 conference records and schedules rated in the bottom half of Division 1 will scavenge for the last tickets to the Big Dance. These teams, which will probably include the West Virginias and Purdues of the world, are not great teams. Their final resumes will be interchangeable with at least a half dozen other teams, unremarkable from dozens of other teams that have and have not made the cut in past years. And yet, now these teams all matter because a scrappy team from Richmond put together an impressive three weeks.
There will be many big games over the next few weeks as college basketball seizes the national spotlight. But pay close attention to those in the middle, too. If the last few tournaments are any indication, Final Fours belong to the middle as much as the one percent.
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