On Friday, higher seeds prevailed in 15 of the 16 matchups but even in a tournament where only 5 lower seeds emerged victorious in the 32 first round games, there is only 1 entry out the 11.57 million entries on ESPN’s Tournament Challenge that picked all 32 contests correctly.  1!  There are 38 entries that had 31 of the 32 teams picked correctly;  that’s .000328% of all ESPN’s brackets.   So when Iowa State and Baylor fell before you left the office on Thursday and you tore your office pool bracket sheet to shreds, feel some solace that you were not alone.  In fact, you might want to pull that baby out of the trashcan and tape that it back together.  As long as you didn’t have the Cyclones or Bears advancing too far, you may be still in line for a payday, because on the whole, favorites did much better than they have in recent years.  The chalk still talks going into the weekend games.

And speaking of a payout, I will leave you with this report from Vegas… Kentucky was 1:500 to beat Hampton and some schlub bet $600 on Kentucky.  The spoils of his wager… $1.20.

So why did the Big East rack up 16% of the 2011 bids?   MONEY.  All of the Big East teams selected for the dance came from significant population centers where even casual fans are engaged by CBS’s masterstroke of sports coverage and marketing, the NCAA Tournament.  (Come on, you can hum the theme in your head).   Schools like tiny St. Mary’s – which has been left behind for two years in a row – have neither the local numbers nor the national panache to generate viewership.  And viewership equals advertising revenue which CBS/Turner Sports desperately needs in order to generate ROI in light of the $10.8 Billion it paid last April for the rights to broadcast the tournament for the next 14 years.

How can the NCAA get around the perception that it relies too heavily on the power conferences?  Like any business, they try to have their cake and eat it too.  It is no coincidence that last April, the NCAA Board of Directors considered increasing the field of schools invited to the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament to a whopping 96.  Do any of you non-conspiracy theorists think that NCAA’s idea of expansion could, perhaps, be driven by the dollars associated with the CBS deal?   There are only a total of 347 Division 1 NCAA programs teams, so increasing the field to 96 means that 27.6% of the teams in the entire nation would qualify for the tournament.  Fortunately for now, wisdom slightly prevailed over greed and the Board of Directors only pushed for a limited expansion of three additional teams in 2011.  For you history buffs, the last time the men’s field was expanded was in 1985, yielding tourney champ Villanova (an 8^th seed) beating mighty Patrick Ewing and Georgetown.  However, in the decade just prior to the 1985 expansion to 64 teams, the NCAA rode the growth wave like a rented mule. 

 The NCAA Board of Directors (aka CBS/Turner Sports pawns) was not going to get to a 96 team field in one fell-swoop, but I believe that history repeats itself, and the NCAA will continue to add teams to the dance in dribs and drabs over the next few years until it ultimately reaches the target 96 team field in by 2018.  You see, NBC owned the rights to broadcast the NCAA Tournament from 1969 to 1981.  CBS began pursuing a new deal 1980 – also coincidentally when the last period of expansion occurred.

The 96-team target of the CBS/NCAA coalition also aligns perfectly with the new American “everyone is a winner” philosophy where we reward mediocrity and all of the kids go home with a trophy.  Congratulations media-education conglomerate, you are well on your way to crapping up the best three weeks in college sports.  And as for VCU – which some proponents claim would not have been in Houston but for the expansion to 68 teams – it’s not the extra three bids this year that allowed the Rams to be included in the tourney. They should have been there in the main bracket of 64 teams instead of Villanova, Penn State, Michigan State, Tennessee or Georgia. Take a look at the pedigree, potential fan base and boosters of those five programs and compare them to VCU.  John Marinatto, the commissioner of the Big East, said it best in a recent e-mail, “Placing 11 teams into the N.C.A.A. championship doesn’t happen by accident. It takes a concerted, consistent and focused effort on the part of our coaches, [and] administrators…”  What do you think that means?