Expanding NCAA field is bad idea any way you cut it

	Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim is championing the idea of expanding the NCAA tournament from its current 65 teams. Bill Frakes/SI
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History's landscape is strewn with lots of bad ideas. The Edsel. Betamax. New Coke. The Tony Danza Show. Now, some coaches and conference commissioners want to expand the NCAA tournament beyond its current 65 teams. Fortunately, it appears this is an idea whose time is still far, far away.

The proponent du jour is Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim, who laid out his case to the NCAA's 10-man basketball committee during a meeting this month with the National Association of Basketball Coaches' Board of Directors. On the face of it, Boeheim's logic is sound. It's been 21 years since the tournament's last major expansion, from 53 to 64 teams. There are more than 50 additional teams competing in Division I, and there are a lot more good teams vying for bids. So why shouldn't the tournament reflect these changes?

"I'm approaching this from a very simplistic point of view," Boeheim told me this week. "George Mason was almost left out this year, and they went to the Final Four. You can easily make the case that there are 10 to 12 more teams out there that could be very competitive in the NCAA tournament. It's a great event, so the more players and fans that can get exposed to it, the better."

By his own admission, however, Boeheim's "simple" idea gets a lot more dicey when it is thrown up against some complicated realities.

Expansion can happen one of two ways. The easiest would be to increase the Tuesday "opening round" from two teams to eight, or even 16, with the winners advancing into Friday's "first round." This, however, would be patently unfair to the small-conference schools who already get such short shrift. I mean, you don't really think those additional Tuesday spots would be filled with teams such as Florida State, Michigan and Cincinnati, do you?

The second model -- which Boeheim prefers -- would entail adding another weekend to the tournament. That would allow the NCAA to grow the field to 80 teams. (Thirty-two teams would play on the first weekend for a chance to face the remaining 48 on the second weekend.) The logistical problems in doing this, however, would be enormous. Either the tournament would start a week earlier, which would mean that the major conference tournaments -- and thus the entire season -- would have to be pushed back a week, or the Final Four would have to take place a week later, which would put it on the same weekend as the Masters. Given that both events are televised by CBS, that prospect is not likely.

Besides, growing the tournament from three weeks to four is no small change. The event already feels like a grueling marathon for all involved. Adding another layer of games would risk dilution and overkill.

Regardless of which scenario is being discussed, there are lots of reasons why expanding the NCAA tournament is a bad idea. Here are a few:

• No matter how many teams you invite, you will be leaving some good ones out.
The notion that expanding to 80 teams will stifle the complaining from castoffs is just plain silly. Somebody will still finish 81st and be ticked off. Unless you want to invite all 334 teams, this problem will never be solved.