Press Box: Adding more teams to NCAA basketball tournaments will not improve them | Jefferson City News-Tribune

The three things you can count on in life -- death, taxes and the NCAA making silly decisions.

All three can make you sad. And the third one really shouldn't be a surprise if you pay any attention to college athletics.

The latest one came last week when the NCAA announced it was expanding the men's and women's basketball tournaments from 68 to 76 teams starting next season.

Yippee! (I wish there were a sarcasm font).

In case you've forgotten, somehow the men's tournament survived without these teams that were listed as the first four out of the event in March.

* Oklahoma (19-15).

* Auburn (17-16).

* San Diego State (22-11).

* Indiana (18-14).

My goodness, it was a travesty to miss out on the chance to see if Auburn could have won twice to finish a game above .500. (Again, sarcasm font).

And who knows who could have been the next four titans of college basketball who missed out by a year of being in the field of 76?

I don't, but I also know, it doesn't really matter. They weren't going to win the whole thing anyway.

Right now, the "first four" games are played across two nights in Dayton, Ohio. But the new plan will be to play six games Tuesday and six more Wednesday to get the field down to 64, with the 12 winners advancing into the bracket with games Thursday and Friday.

There's no way Dayton will be able to handle all that, so a second host city will be added. It will likely be west of the Mississippi River, to help cut down on travel for the winners. Just spitballing here, but Springfield and the Great Southern Bank Arena? If I was a big-wig in Southwest Missouri -- or heck, maybe in the state government -- I'd already have at least tried to schedule a meeting with somebody in the NCAA about it.

But back to the big issue. What's wrong with allowing eight more programs to make it? They'll get the experience of playing in an NCAA Tournament game, even if it is in Dayton.

My answer is this. They already are playing in the NCAA Tournament. Everyone is, it's called their conference tournament. All conferences have one and for the majority of those teams, a loss and they're done for the season. Just like the NCAA.

There's one way -- and there's no way this will happen -- the tournament expanding would be palatable to me.

Every team that wins its conference tournament -- be that the big ones like SEC, ACC or Big Ten or the little ones like the Southland or the Summit or the SWAC -- get a spot in the bracket of 64. No play-in games for the smaller conferences, they're in the field. Make the so-called power four conference at-large bids match up against each other in the Tuesday/Wednesday games for a spot.

The conference tournament winners have earned their spots. This year, two of those games featured games of 16-seeds -- Howard vs. UMBC and Prairie View A&M vs. Lehigh. Basketball junkies, and I guess those who might dabble in the dark arts of gambling on teams you might catch a glimpse of on ESPU on a random Wednesday night, might have watched those contests. But those 16 vs. 16 games provided little more than a break in programming on truTV from episodes of Impractical Jokers.

At least six games like Texas against North Carolina State we saw this year would draw some attention from casual fans.

Since it's going to happen, Springfield and Missouri might as well throw its hat -- and the throwed rolls at Lambert's -- in the ring as a potential host site.