Can the Bulldogs give NCAA hegemony the ol' Fork in the Eye one more time?In four hours, the Butler University basketball team of the undistinguished Horizon League and their 4,512 students will have the opportunity to jump off the water cooler into either sports immortality or sobering reality at the conclusion of tonight’s national championship game. With zero players on the roster who were rated four-star recruits coming out of high school and a 33-year-old coach who doesn't look like he's ever had a five o'clock shadow, the Bulldogs have enjoyed a run for the ages that will come to a close in their hometown of Indianapolis.
Their opponent, on the other hand, merely seeks to add to a winning tradition that already includes 14 Final Fours and three national titles. In fact, all but one of the scholarship players on Duke's roster was either a four or five-star recruit, with five of them former McDonald's All-Americans. Don’t believe Coach K when he attempts to beguile the media and fans with tales of illogica fantastica on how no one expected his Atlantic Coast Conference champion Blue Devils to make it to Lucas Oil Stadium in their office pools. (Because all number one seeds face an uphill battle, right Mike?). He is right about one thing, however; college basketball’s answer to the independent voter will be coming out in overwhelming numbers across America in support of the candidate from the Heartland.
But if you pull up the lid and look under the simple plot of David vs. Goliath, you’ll find that there’s much more at stake than a happy ending to a heart-warming story of a little guy who decided one day to damn the consequences and give his bully an ominous elbow to the throat.
For starters, the NCAA selection committee would come under amplified scrutiny regarding the way mid-major schools are seeded in the future. Won-loss record and RPI are main talking points when determining seeding. If I told you that the school in question was ranked No. 8 in the entire country by human polls (ESPN/USA Today) and No. 12 by computer polls (RPI), attained a 28-4 regular season record, was the only D-1 team to go undefeated in conference while riding a 20-game winning streak, and went 2-1 against the rest of the Top 25, where would you seed this team?
If the answer is fifth, which is what the committee ultimately decided, you would be doing a disservice to a Butler team which proved it was better than the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds in its region by eliminating both of them from the tournament. (Then again, the NCAA has made some menial strides compared with 2002, when the committee excluded the Bulldogs because they didn’t believe they were worthy of a 16-seed even after going 25-5! Look it up.) Do you think if a mid-major like Butler won it all this season that other small schools would be treated with more respect with seeding if they garnered the same credentials next season?
Second, the effects of a Butler victory would not only be felt across college basketball, but would also reverberate through the other college revenue sport—football. Can you imagine the Bowl Championship Series committee coming under more fire for perpetuating a non-playoff system where a mid-major team like Boise State can go undefeated again next season and still be denied at least a share of a national title? If Butler can prove they are the best team in the nation on the court, the media pressure on college football to have some semblance of a playoff system will rise to unprecedented heights.
Throughout the history of college football, schools outside of the Big Six conferences (ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-10, and SEC) have been excluded from multimillion-dollar payouts through the 1) the subjective and biased nature of at-large selections due to contracted Big Six conference pairings, e.g., the Rose Bowl’s ties to the Pac-10 and Big Ten; and 2) Rule 3B of Automatic Qualification portion of the BCS selection procedures, which states that “no more than one such team" from a non-Big Six school shall earn an automatic berth in any year, while the “remaining team or teams will be considered for at-large selection if it meets the criteria.”
In other words, this rule is the equivalent to the NCAA selection committee having the wide discretion to exclude mid-major conference champions from March Madness. Just ‘cuz. Much like a Big Six conference that stands to lose a $31 million payday from losing a national title berth to the WAC or concede $18 million from losing a regular BCS berth to the Mountain West, the stakes are high for the aforementioned conferences to field additional teams in the über-lucrative men’s basketball tournament, albeit unfairly at the expense of a more deserving mid-major school.
Then, you have the big, bad NCAA hyperventilating through paper bags in hopes that Duke will maintain the status quo regarding the prevailing school of thought that it’s impossible for a true mid-major school to win it all. The last thing they want is for their proposal to expand the current March Madness field from 65 to 96 to be torpedoed by ammunition in the form of an upstart mid-major enforcing the current setup of four 16-seed regions as conducive toward parity, fairness, and maximum excitement. It’s no mystery that in the midst of economic recovery, and building pressure on athletic departments in Big Six conferences to be more self-sufficient, that increasing the field will allow more of these high-major athletic programs to acquire a share of the monstrous NCAA Tournament revenue pie to offset their individual mounting costs.
In addition, a tournament where the top 32 seeds would receive a bye would make it even more daunting for a school like Butler to survive a gauntlet that is already unevenly stacked against it due to its prejudiced, unfavorable seeding. The vast majority of the media and public have already voiced their displeasure with fixing something that isn’t broken, and if such a move were to go forward, Gordon Heyward cutting down the nets tonight would only exacerbate suspicions of the NCAA’s ulterior motives of a shameless moneygrab.
Let’s not forget CBS’s role in a 96-team tournament next year. The Big Eye is in the middle of an 11-year, $6 billion contract to televise the NCAA Tournament. According to Advertising Age, their coverage generates $4.76 per viewer offline and $4.26 per viewer online. If you take WPP’s Kantar Media research’s word for it, CBS expects to earn $37 million in ad revenues from its March Madness on Demand, and will probably surpass the $619 million in TV advertising and 130 million viewers that was generated by last year’s telecast. Now add another round’s worth of games to follow, and extending the mileage of "One Shining Moment" for one more weekend fattens the Golden Goose exponentially. With ratings in mind, however, I don't think Les Moonves and the rest of the CBS execs were salivating over the prospects of a Butler-West Virginia title game. I would think they would have a vested interest in keeping the Big Six schools at the forefront of their programming.
And for those of you who have been following the tournament through your iPhone, it's worth noting that your CBS March Madness application is double last year’s price at $9.99 and sits second overall out of all iPhone paid sports apps. It’s clear CBS stands a lot to gain from an extra 31 teams punching their ticket to the Big Dance in 2011, a move that might not happen if an upset tonight leads to fans and media circling the wagons to keep the current setup in place.
In summary, one would be hard-pressed not to root for Butler tonight, not just for sentimental reasons, but to keep alive the waning belief that not everything under the sun is for sale. Moreover, it would probably mark the only time in recent memory when the underdog has the means to elicit significant and sustainable change in the way we view the nature of high-stakes competition on a collegiate level.
Ryan Maquiñana is a freelance journalist whose articles have been featured on MaxBoxing.com, SecondsOut.com, and DoghouseBoxing.com, with contributing credits on the latest San Francisco McSweeney's Quarterly. He can be reached at rmaquinana@gmail.com.
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