ESPN Men's Basketball

In mid-April, we learned of potentially dire, downright unthinkable news: The Ivy League was considering -- gasp -- a season-ending conference tournament. No, Ivy League, no! Say it isn't so!

It isn't so. Today, the Ivy League announced via a release that its "directors of athletics have decided not to move forward with proposals for postseason tournaments in men's and women's basketball."

"After careful consideration of these proposals, the athletics directors decided that our current method of determining the Ivy League Champion and our automatic bid recipient to the NCAA Championship is the best model moving forward," said Robin Harris, Ivy League Executive Director.

I agree, for two reasons:

1. If nothing else, the Ivy League -- from a cultural/educational standpoint, but also a sporting one -- is about tradition. Tradition is what makes its schools so unique, and it's what makes the league itself, marginal mid-major though it often is, stand out. The 14-game round-robin schedule and the lack of a conference tournament is one of these things. Keep it.

2. I actually believe this is how every conference -- or at least every non-BCS conference -- should handle its conference tournament. Sure, I love über-underdog runs like 2012 Western Kentucky's as much as the next fan. But not as much as I hate seeing worthy tournament teams, who dominated their leagues all season but can't schedule nonconference opponents commensurate to receiving an at-large bid, being left by the wayside. Middle Tennessee State went 27-7 overall in 2012, and 14-2 in the Sun Belt regular season. But a three-point upset in the first round of the Sun Belt conference tournament relegated the Blue Raiders to the NIT (where, it might or might not be worth noting, they beat Marshall and Tennessee before falling to Minnesota).

Conference tournaments are exciting, no question. Everybody gathers with one automatic bid on the line, and all your favorite team needs to make its last-ditch tournament dreams a reality is three or four days of hot shooting and energetic play. It can be thrilling. It can also be massively unfair. Settling that bid over the course of a season, with an entire round-robin schedule of games, is a far more sporting (now there's an Ivy League term) way to go about your AQ business.

Of course, this is just sort of the way college basketball works. It's the beauty of the NCAA tournament in a nutshell, this small-sample-size randomness. I wouldn't expect large-scale adoption of the Ivy League's model anytime soon. But it is good to see at least one league, the good old Ivy, place so much value -- the right amount of value -- on its regular season. The rest of the sport could take a note.

1. The National Association of Basketball Coaches' board of directors is meeting in Indianapolis on Thursday, with the issue of transfers and how to handle the requests as a primary agenda item. The board has some notable names, including Wisconsin coach Bo Ryan, who was involved in a high-profile case in which the player was initially restricted from transferring to a number of schools; Michigan State’s Tom Izzo; Pitt’s Jamie Dixon; Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim; Notre Dame’s Mike Brey; and NC State’s Mark Gottfried, among others. The NABC doesn’t have legislative power but does serve as a lobbying group to the membership -- and can also influence other coaches on how to handle a transfer situation.

2. The men's NCAA tournament basketball selection committee will also meet Thursday in Indianapolis. The primary agenda item, according to incoming chair Mike Bobinski of Xavier, is to determine the 2013 East Regional site. The finalists are expected to be Syracuse and Brooklyn (Newark, N.J., is still technically in, but it would be a surprise since the regional was there in 2011). Bobinski said it is unusual for the site still to be unknown less than a year before the event. The dismissal of former NCAA vice president Greg Shaheen apparently contributed to the site selection delay; Shaheen’s replacement, Mark Lewis, will be at the meeting. The original plan was for the tourney’s 75th anniversary to have a presence at Madison Square Garden. But the NCAA couldn’t make a commitment before the Garden had to turn in its Knicks and Rangers schedules to the NBA and NHL, respectively. The 2013 Final Four is in Atlanta. The other regional sites are set in Los Angeles (Staples Center), Dallas-Fort Worth (Cowboys Stadium) and Indianapolis (Lucas Oil Stadium)

3. New Illinois coach John Groce has added two transfers in Rayvonte Rice from Drake and Sam McLaurin from Coastal Carolina. The Illini are also busy finalizing their last major non-conference game. Illinois will play Auburn on Dec. 29 at the United Center in Chicago to fill the final significant game on the schedule.

Today, Beyond the Arc's Troy Machir took a survey of some of the nation's best teams, and some of the nation's most "clutch" players, and asked the above headline's first question. Final possession. Game on the line. Who gets the final shot?

It's a great post and a fun read, and the whole time I was sitting there enjoying it -- oh, yeah, Doug McDermott, you bet -- I couldn't help but think: Who cares?

Why would I say that? I'm not being callous. (Promise!) It's not an inane question. In fact, it's an entirely valid one. The problem, I think, is that college hoops fans and basketball fans in general are maybe just a touch too consumed with the idea that teams need to have a go-to crunch time player, someone they can lean on to take and make the final, all-important shot. This is part of basketball lore. It's practically accepted as gospel. Basketball is a game that rewards, or at least seems to reward, heroism. But why is this the best way to score in crunch time?

Obviously, it doesn't hurt to have a star player on your team, one you can count on when you need buckets most. When the game is on the line, you want the ball in this player's hands. Of course you do. He can score, he can draw a double-team, and so on and so forth. But when players or teams become too consumed by this idea -- when they become predictable -- the hero thing can be as much a liability as an asset.

Last year, TrueHoop's Henry Abbott wrote about this idea as it relates to Kobe Bryant. It's not easy to challenge the myth of Bryant, cold-blooded last-second killer -- there are these people called Lakers fans, and they are legion, and they don't much like it when you appear to even remotely criticize Kobe -- but Henry, per the usual, did his homework. In "The truth about Kobe Bryant in crunch time," he wrote:

No matter how you define crunch time -- from the last five minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime to the last 24 seconds -- and no matter how you define production -- field goal percentage, offensive efficiency, David Berri's Wins Produced, the results tell the same story: Bryant is about as likely to hit the big shot as any player.

ESPN Stats & Information's Alok Pattani dug through 15 years of NBA data (see table below) -- Bryant's entire career, regular season and playoffs -- and found that Bryant has attempted 115 shots in the final 24 seconds of a game in which the Lakers were tied or trailed by two or fewer points. He connected on 36, and missed 79 times.

One shot for all the cookies. And the NBA is nearly unanimous that this is the guy to take it, even though he has more than twice as many misses as makes? [...] Bryant shoots more than most, passes less and racks up misses at an all-time rate. There is no measure, other than YouTube highlights and folklore, by which he's the best scorer in crunch time.

Now, what's true of Kobe Bryant isn't necessarily true of every star player in college basketball. And college basketball -- in particular the NCAA tournament -- is an entirely different animal from the NBA. Plus, this is just common sense: You want the ball in the hands of your best player as much as possible, but especially when the defense is juiced and the clock is winding down and the games and the seasons and the legacies are on the line. Duh.

But it's just as easy to go too far, to stick to this idea despite evidence to the contrary, and Bryant is a perfect example. Henry was spurred to write his post because he won a 79 percent landslide vote in a poll asking general manages which NBA player they'd want to take the final shot. That was Bryant's ninth-straight year atop that poll. But the numbers didn't, and don't, add up.

The same principle, writ large, applies to college hoops. Perhaps the most obvious example this year is Syracuse. Despite being 28-1 and dominating the Big East, the Orange don't have an obvious Big East Player of the Year candidate, or at least no player you'd take above any of the others on the team were you forced to choose. Instead, what Syracuse has at any given time in any given lineup is a group of five very good players. Each brings different attributes and scoring abilities on the offensive end. But a few months ago, at a taping of ESPNU Experts, I heard a few of my fellow panelists worry about who Syracuse's "man" was. In a crunch time situation, who would step up? Who takes the final shot?

That wasn't the last time I heard that sort of question asked about Syracuse. The better question to me is why would you want just one guy? If you're Syracuse, and you're lucky enough to have a balanced team capable of scoring from a variety of places on the floor, why wouldn't you treat your final possession the way you treated the 65 or 70 that preceded it? Why wouldn't you work for the best possible shot, no matter who takes it?

In some cases -- say, a mid-major team with one singular star, a la Damian Lillard at Weber State -- the best shot is the one your best player creates for himself. But if you're a team that can afford to be unpredictable, well, that's a huge advantage! Why negate it by advertising your intentions beforehand?

(It should be noted here, again, that this is not a criticism of Troy's post. He actually accounts for this by listing certain teams' "backup plans," which, as we saw in Antoine Young's game-winner for Creighton last Saturday, can be every bit as important. Troy gets it.)

It's just curious, is all. If you have a transcendant game-winning force like Michael Jordan on your team, then of course you're going to get him the ball. But in college hoops, the notion of needing that one guy -- the "man," so to speak -- seems almost counterproductive. Need to score in the final minute? Get the best shot.

It's easier said than done, of course. But in theory, shouldn't it always be just that simple?

1. The NCAA tournament selection committee will meet again next week and if there are five key points that the committee will look at when evaluating teams, they are: losses vs. RPI 151 and below; non-conference strength of schedule; road record; RPI and wins versus the top 50 and top 100. And that’s why Middle Tennessee State's road game at Vanderbilt on Saturday could be a huge pop for the Blue Raiders if they can pull the upset.

2. It will be interesting to see at the end of the season which Zeller finishes up stronger. Indiana's Cody Zeller was a top-25 finalist for the Wooden Award. North Carolina's Tyler Zeller was not. Cody Zeller scored 7 points and had 3 rebounds in a loss at Wisconsin Thursday. Tyler Zeller scored 21 points and had 17 boards in a victory over NC State. Both Zellers have to play well for their respective teams to reach their respective goals – an NCAA appearance for IU, an NCAA title for UNC.

3. The NCAA continues to investigate UConn’s Ryan Boatright about possible extra benefits prior to college. The NCAA claims it has a duty to investigate once it receives credible information. This isn’t about players but about facts that come to its attention. But the NCAA has its ears open as to how top high school players get to unofficial visits.

When are two words worth $17.2 million? When you have many more millions -- correction: billions -- riding on this little thing called the NCAA tournament.

Yes, according to USA Today's Steve Weiberg, last October the NCAA quietly went about securing the trademark rights to the term "March Madness." The NCAA paid the sum to get sports and entertainment marketing company Intersport to stop using the term (most recently) in programming for mobile devices. Intersport is, according to its website, an "award-winning innovator and leader in the creation of sports and entertainment based marketing platforms" [sic]. More concretely, it plans events like the high school slam-dunk and three-point contests that take place the same week as the Final Four and, in fact, took out the original trademark rights on "March Madness" more than 20 years ago.

There have been other, smaller claims on "March Madness," particularly by the Illinois High School Association, which shared the trademark with Intersport before relinquishing control but retaining use of the term for its state basketball championship tournaments, according to Weiberg.

If $17 million seems like a lot of money for the rights to a popularly used phrase, consider the following: The NCAA has a $700-million annual budget. That budget was made possible almost entirely by the massive (read: 14 years, $11 billion) television rights fees CBS and Turner paid the NCAA to broadcast the NCAA tournament. The NCAA tournament is frequently referred to as "March Madness."

I'm not sure $17 million isn't disproportionate to the cause at hand here. After all, it's not like people are going to be confused when you say "March Madness" simply because a marketing company uses the words on an iPhone app. That term will always be associated with the NCAA tournament. It's not going away. But with that much money on the line, one can understand the vigilance.

Just when you thought the NCAA tournament couldn't possibly get more awesome.

OK, so the tourney has its flaws. Sixty-eight teams. (Meh.) Games on TruTV. (Wha?) The inability to clone Gus Johnson and send him to every broadcast location simultaneously. (Waitin' on you, science.) And, yes, non-staggered start times.

You know how it goes. Each block of games on that magical Thursday and Friday of the tourney's first weekend starts at around the same time, which more often than not means the games end at the same time, which makes tracking every possible minute detail of every game -- especially under a minute in buzzer-beater territory -- pretty difficult. This like complaining that the cherry on top of your delicious hot fudge sundae isn't quite fresh enough, but, still, it's a complaint.

No more. According to a report by the Associated Press today, the NCAA tournament's new television contract -- which includes games on CBS, TBS, TNT and TruTV, as mentioned above -- "will allow for more staggered starts of games, so all of those buzzer-beaters aren't happening at the same time." Not only will we have the option of watching every single NCAA tournament game whenever we want this year, staggered start times will make that task about 5,000 times easier and more enjoyable.

In fact, there's no reason an enterprising fan couldn't see every possible buzzer-beater of the entire NCAA tournament as it happens live. That project is now eminently feasible. In other words, you better start manufacturing awesome day-off excuses now. You've got the entire NCAA tournament to watch, and you can't be wasting that time on things like work.

The handling fees the NCAA once charged fans for the chance to buy NCAA tournament tickets might violate the Indiana state lottery law, a federal appeals court ruled last week.

According to Bloomberg, the ruling overturned the previous dismissal of a lawsuit brought on by consumers in New York, Arizona and Oregon who are suing for compensatory and punitive damages.

The Indianapolis-based NCAA sells tickets for its top-rank Division I college basketball and hockey championships by accepting applications for more tickets than are actually available. The association keeps a $6 to $10 "handling" fee for each entry, even if the applicant doesn’t get a ticket, the appeals court said.

"Win or lose, the service fee was forfeited by all entrants and retained by the NCAA," the court said in a 2-1 decision. The judges sent the case back to the lower court for further proceedings.

The NCAA, of course, disagrees with the ruling since it might end up costing the organization big bucks. And because of that, maybe a segment of college basketball fans should root against the lawsuit as well.

After all, a more desperately cash-hungry NCAA is an NCAA that could renew a push for a 96-team tournament. No more ticket handling fees? More game tickets for sale might take care of that problem.

Tuesday, when announcing the NCAA's decision to use a hybrid format for the NCAA tournament's expanded suite of play-in -- excuse me, "first round" -- games, outgoing selection committee chair Dan Guerrero wisely admitted that no matter what the NCAA did, it wouldn't please everybody. Not that it didn't try:

"You're not going to come up with the perfect model," outgoing committee chair Dan Guerrero said. "You're not going to come up with a model that is going to appease every constituency out there. But we felt that this model provided the opportunity to do something special for the tournament."

How did the NCAA do? After a day of reaction, most hoops media and fans seem to be, well, tenuously OK with the idea. A general consensus has formed: The idea isn't perfect, but if expansion has to happen, this is a creative, appealing way to do it. There are plenty of dissenters in the mix, too, people who find this whole hybrid nonsense a joke. Try as they might, the NCAA didn't please everybody. But considering the circumstances, it got pretty darn close.

Anyway, here's a roundup of some of the prevailing hoops opinion about the NCAA's new expansion format. As always, if you have links or posts you want me to see, hit me up on Twitter. Onward:

• First, in case you missed them, here's a spate of reactions from our own team: Pat Forde says the hybrid format makes the best of a bad idea; Bracketologist Joe Lunardi approves; Dana O'Neil checks in with coaches, who seem to like the new format far more than the media do; and I cheerily wrote that I was pleasantly surprised by the expansion's end result.
• Mike Miller is interested in the TruTV move, which he thinks could be brilliant: "The strangest move may be where the games will be broadcast: TruTV. Yes, TruTV, formerly known as Court TV, the place I turned to in college to solve my insomnia. I suppose that's one way to boost the tournament's 'reach' among average viewers, given that TruTV is in roughly 93 million households, while ESPN and ESPN2 are both in about 100 million. College hoops fans will seek out the 'First Four' games on a different network, while I doubt TruTV viewers would've changed to ESPN, which is where the play-in game has been shown the last few years. To recap: The Big Dance expands to 68 teams in 2011 and features four first-round games that will be shown on a non-sports network. Times do change."
• SB Nation's Chris Dobbertean sums up the prevailing opinion well: "While I still feel expansion was a completely unnecessary innovation, a three-team jump was certainly the way to go, and this format, even though it smacks of trying to please everyone involved, should work well."
• Rush the Court points out the problems with the all at-large format: "Putting the last eight at-large invitees in these games would have had its own problems, namely making higher seeded teams play one more game to win a championship than do the lowest seeds. Further, there would have been issues about how to seed these teams and where the winner of the games would be seeded. And then there’s the issue that these teams, entirely from either BCS conferences or mid-major conferences, would have the chance to earn extra money from potentially competing in another NCAA tournament game while the one-bid conference teams don’t get such a chance and instead have to settle for their one in a million (hyperbole alert) chance against a one or two seed."
• John Gasaway is more negative than most, but he has his reasons: "I realize many pundits are fine with this today, but wait until they see it in action with actual team names inserted into these brackets. Inevitably a five-seed will lose to a 12 that emerged from a play-in game and we’ll hear all the usual talk about the 'advantage' and 'momentum' the 12 had from playing already. And as for talk of 10-seeds being in play-in games, mark me down as absolutely terrified. I’m already on the record as thinking that tournament seeding has far too little to do with reality. (And note that today’s decision only raises the stakes that will be riding on a team’s seed.) Now, if you’re talking about a team seeded as high as a 10, there’s a good chance that said team is way better than the selection committee could have realized. To require a team that good to win an extra game while every year the 64th-best team in the field is guaranteed a comparatively easy six-win path is antithetical to what’s made the NCAA tournament the best postseason spectacle in major American team sports. We’ve trusted the tournament’s outcomes precisely to the extent that the courts have been neutral, the brackets have been balanced, and the opportunities have been equal. Don’t get me wrong. A 68-team field with a funky hybrid play-in round is ten times better than a 96-team field. But today was a mistake and, worse, it was entirely avoidable."
• Andy Glockner calls the NCAA's hedge "disappointing": "Now? We're left with the middle ground. The general public won't be interested in two of the First Four games, with the small-conference matchups likely to be buried in the afternoon on truTV. The bracket isn't significantly improved and the ongoing slippery slope of sacrifice of conference champs continues. This compromise also feels like a test case for a move to a 72-team event in which the eight weakest teams play for the 16-seeds and the last eight at-larges play for four spots. If that's where we're heading, they should have just done it to the small schools now. At least then they could start cashing in by beating each other in the tournament, rather than losing by 40 during the regular season in games that truly are shows about nothing."
• CBS' Gary Parrish is just thankful he has a reason to watch on Tuesday night: "I wanted no expansion, but I thought the NCAA would expand to 96. So a 68-team field is fine with me because it's not as bad as it could've been. Likewise, I wanted the final eight at-large teams to play 'opening round' games, but I thought the NCAA would simply take the eight worst automatic qualifiers. So a compromise between the two -- the final four at-large teams and the worst four automatic qualifiers will compete in the 'opening round' games -- is not as bad as it could've been. So I'm not as mad as I could've been. In fact, I'm cool with it. Had this format been in place last season, we would've got something like UTEP vs. Mississippi State and Ole Miss. vs. Illinois on the Tuesday or Wednesday after Selection Sunday, and though those games aren't marquee in the traditional sense, they are much more intriguing than Arkansas-Pine Bluff vs. Winthrop. In other words, I'll watch. For the first time ever, I'll watch the NCAA tournament before Thursday."
• Ballin' Is A Habit wonders if the new format hurts the office tournament pool: "Speaking of average fans, a huge reason why the NCAA Tournament is able to garner the money and attention it does is because everyone and their brother fills out a bracket. With this extra day of games -- of meaningful games -- occurring on a Tuesday, what does this do to the average office pool? Are people going to get organized, make their picks, get their money in, etc. in two days? Teams seeded 10th, 11th, and 12th are the most popular upset picks. What if two of those seeds aren't determined? If pool organizers decide the wait until after those games are played -- essentially giving everyone a freebie pick on those games -- will anyone actually want to watch them? How many people are truly going to care about Utah State playing NC State without a pick on the line?"
• Yahoo! Sports' Matt Norlander has his share of concerns, but he does like that the big boys are now accountable: "Accountability for the major-conference teams: The big boys have to shut up if they don't win. Sure, we're going to have a school or two bicker if they miss the CHANCE to play in the play-in, but there's no whining to be done after the play-in has been completed. Win to get into the main field. [...] We will now know the final teams chosen in the field. A true 'final four' of at-larges. Only thing is, they'll be slated according to RPI."
• Mike DeCourcy says the NCAA is doing so well making big decisions we should put them in charge of goal-line technology in soccer: "Overall, the committee's work hints at the touch of a legislative genius — the sort of person who conceives workable ideas that can widely be agreed upon as solid compromises. The format the tournament will use was not among those originally identified by Guerrero as possible solutions. He declined to identify who came up with this approach, though. He said it developed from 'a natural evolution' in the discussion. It's not as though the committee members have found a way to make calorie-free ice cream cones, but what they've conceived causes the least disruption to the fewest amount of people — and gives Turner something decent to put on TV. [...] The committee has had a heck of a year in 2010. What would make 2011 even better? Well, it'd be awesome if they pick a deserving field, seed it properly — and aren't asked to do any more work on tournament expansion."

Any time you hear the words "ticket" and "scalp" in the same sentence, the neck hairs tend to stand up. The Kansas ticket fraud scandal that rocked the Jayhawks athletic department in May (and might have had something to do with KU athletic director Lew Perkins' decision to retire in September of 2011) only added to a long history of negative, sketchy associations surrounding the practice of buying and selling tickets on the secondary market.

Outside stadiums, this is no big deal. It hasn't been a big deal for a very long time. But in college sports, the stakes are different; the practice of giving tickets to boosters and families belies commercialization and creates the potential for big problems if those tickets start drifting into the wrong hands. Like, you know, at Kansas. It would probably be better for everyone if, like most professional sports, college sports worked with a legitimate broker and brought its secondary ticket market into the open.

Which brings us to our "Did you know?" of the day: Did you know that since 2007 the NCAA has partnered with a secondary market ticket broker at NCAA Final Four events? It's true:

The NCAA in 2007 enlisted the Razorgator online exchange service as its "official ticket and hospitality package provider" for the men's Final Four. The deal has since been extended to include the women's Final Four, the College World Series, Frozen Four hockey tournament and the remaining four rounds of March Madness.

Greg Shaheen, an NCAA senior vice president, said the association was tired of watching secondary market ticket sellers profit off the NCAA's name and reputation. He said the partnership with Razorgator also allows the NCAA to limit ticket fraud. "It acknowledges reality," Shaheen said. "Our goal is to provide a legitimate, safe, guaranteed means by which those transactions occur."

The Final Four is a pretty unique situation. There are thousands of fans who purchase tickets in the hopes their teams advance to Monday night's title game; when that doesn't happen, plenty of those fans are ready to sell their wares, pack their things, and get back to the depressing fact that work starts again on Monday. Letting all those tickets go through an unsupervised outside influence (or, more likely, the hundreds of outside influences that stand outside arenas and shout "I got tickets! I need tickets! Who's selling? Who needs tickets?" which is always inherently hilarious) is just a bad idea.

This isn't limited to the NCAA, or the Final Four. In 2007, after years of fighting tooth and nail with the secondary market, Major League Baseball partnered with Stubhub. This has gone incredibly well:

Bob Bowman, the CEO of MLB Advance Media, the arm of the sport that runs MLB.com, said most teams have come to the realization that the secondary market is a benefit, not a blow. "We're in the secondary market whether we embraced it or not," he said. "There's no one who can go to all 81 games. The clubs don't benefit from tickets in the drawer."

Bowman acknowledged that at least some of the credit for teams selling a record number of tickets again this year is due to the rapid growth of online ticket resales on StubHub and similar services. "Without question, the increasing knowledge that there is a vibrant, safe, legal liquid market for the tickets encourages our fans to buy season ticket packages, since they know they can recoup some of those costs."

All of which is a long way of saying that individual schools should start doing this, too. Some already are: Stubhub currently partners with 13 schools, with Alabama, Louisville, Purdue, Stanford, USC and Wisconsin among them, to sell secondary tickets. Theoretically, that should help athletic departments like Kansas' avoid ticket fraud. Why buy a ticket from a dude "with a connection" when you can go online and find your seat with the click of a button?

It won't completely kill ticket fraud, but it should help bring the process out of the dark ages and into the 21st century. Then shady dudes with questionable tickets won't have a place to peddle their wares, Kansas won't hemorrhage millions in ticket sales, and athletic directors won't have to spend as much time overseeing their ticket operations for fear of losing their jobs. Boosters can use the Internet, too! Everybody wins!

Well, except for the shady dudes. But they'll get over it, I'm sure.

As always, we should consider ourselves fortunate that the one remaining piece of NCAA tournament formatting business is this simple. Had the NCAA decided to expand its marquee event to 96 teams, we'd currently be fussing over a host of unwieldy issues -- how to seed the tournament, how scheduling would work, what to do with the NIT. It would be a mess.

Thankfully, it's just the play-in games. 68 teams means three more play-in games in each region, and the NCAA's next task is to decide which teams will be competing in those games. Will it be small schools seeded No. 16 and No. 17, similar to the current format? Or will the NCAA take a more drastic, exciting step, forcing the last eight at-large teams to play for a No. 12 seed?

This week, the men's basketball committee will decide just that. (Update: This process could take much longer than a week, according to our own Andy Katz.) Only two things are certain. One: The NCAA would really prefer you not call them "play-in" games. Technically, everybody's in the tournament. Yay! (The NCAA would also like to know if you would like an orange slice at halftime.) And two: All well and good, but pretty much no one wants to be in the play-in games anyway, thanks:

After meeting in May, the committee asked NCAA schools to give their opinions on the recommended expansion to four opening-round games, one in each region. Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith confirmed there were three options on the list -- making the eight lowest seeds in the tourney play in the opening round, making the last eight at-large teams in the field play or a combination of the two.

The only clear answer heading into the meetings, which start Sunday, is this: Nobody wants to play in the opening-round games.

Teams competing in conferences such as the Southland, like Hickey's Roadrunners, or the Southwestern Athletic, a league made up primarily of historically black colleges and universities, do not want to be pigeonholed into playing an extra tourney game each year. Power-conference schools, which usually take most of the 34 at-large bids, think they should avoid the opening-round games, too.

What's interesting is that teams and athletic directors and conferences themselves have been lobbying the committee from all sides throughout Gene Smith's information-gathering process. How the committee weighs those various arguments could end up swinging the end result one way or the other. This sounds obvious, and it is. But it will be interesting to see if small schools can have as much lobbying power as the big boys. Or, failing that, if the lobbying process really works at all.

Perhaps just as interesting is that no one seems to know which way the committee might be leaning. So, in the interest of being servicey, here's yours truly's no doubt eagerly awaited and not at all original recommendation (drum roll, please): Make the big boys play.

The end result isn't as big a deal as you'd think. The tournament will still be entertaining either way, and there's an argument to be made that the increase of quality teams inherent in a 68-team field will push higher seeds to the brink of upset even more frequently. But if you're the NCAA, and you have the choice, why wouldn't you opt for a high-stakes playoff between two high-profile potential No. 12 seeds? The entertainment factor is multiplied -- fans would be five times as interested in Illinois vs. Virginia Tech as they are in your current play-in game.

Moreover, it would be a nice symbolic statement. The last eight at-large teams are frequently mediocre underachievers from major conferences. If they're mediocre enough to be the last at-large team in the tournament, they don't have the right to complain about their placement; they had plenty of chances to prove otherwise in the season's first five months. The smallest schools are not as skilled or as talented. They don't have deep pockets. But they are conference champions, and seeding them in the tournament automatically, rather than in an ancillary competition, would be a tidy nod to what makes the NCAA tournament great in the first place.

It's a rare chance for the NCAA. It can simultaneously increase its tournament's entertainment value and the number of unknown mid-majors in that tournament. There are two birds just sitting here, waiting to be killed. Will the men's basketball committee pick up the stone?

It's something we discuss frequently come tournament time. A potential at-large mid-major has 26 wins, a regular-season conference title, a few questionable losses here and there, and a noticeable dearth of quality wins. As often as not, this team doesn't get in the tournament. Typically, scheduling takes the blame.

It's not easy for mid-majors, especially ones with serious chances at making the NCAA tournament, to convince the big boys to play them. It's almost impossible to get a big-time team to play at the mid-major's building, and it's nearly as difficult to get high-majors to schedule mid-majors at all.

Why? Because high-majors from big-time conferences don't want the risk. If your average Big Ten team keeps its head down, gets 20 solid wins, and finishes near the top half of its conference, it gives itself a pretty good chance at sliding easily into the NCAA tournament. Why take on plucky underdogs whose RPI doesn't reflect the true nature of their skill? Why risk it?

This happens every year. Lately, though, it seems to be getting worse. The Washington Post's Eric Prisbell interviewed a wide swath of mid-major coaches about their scheduling woes, and the common refrain is not surprising: No one will play us. And there's nothing we can do.

The whole story is full of great anecdotes, but this one from Utah State Aggies coach Stew Morrill paints the picture pretty well:

At Utah State, which has reached the NCAA tournament in six of the past 10 seasons, no one had much luck luring opponents to Logan, Utah, where the Aggies are 176-13 in 12 seasons under Coach Stew Morrill. So officials enlisted a prominent promoter to try to schedule a couple of nonleague games on a neutral floor against power-conference teams. He returned with a declaration: "You're right, no one wants to play you."

"It has been a nightmare," Morrill said.

Morrill said he has even tried to persuade good friend Mike Montgomery, the California coach, to play a home-and-home series against Utah State, only to elicit this response: "He just laughs at me," Morrill said. "He says: 'We're not playing you, that doesn't do us any good. I'm not that stupid.' Even your best buddies don't want to play."

This is frustrating for me, and I'm just your random college hoops dude. Imagine how frustrating it is for these coaches. Whether or not they make the NCAA tournament comes down to how good their team is, first and foremost, but it also comes down to how many opportunities that team has to prove how good it is. When other coaches control so many of those opportunities, well, how is that fair? And the difference between making the NCAA tournament and missing it can oftentimes be the difference between keeping your job or losing. Yeah, I'd be angry too.

Is there a solution here? It's hard to say. Bracketbusters is a good start; if big-time teams won't give mid-majors the time of day, then top mid-majors should work to prove themselves against one another. The problem here is that this cannibalizes the have-nots, makes them survive one another rather than giving them a shot at the haves. One frequently discussed solution involves the NCAA mandating a certain number of games against former NCAA tournament qualifiers from non-BCS conferences, but that's a logistical nightmare.

In the end, perhaps the best thing the NCAA can do is instruct its tournament selection committee to take this sort of scheduling inequality into consideration as it examines the best at-large teams in each year's pool. Sure, Mid-Major X might not have any marquee wins. But whose fault is that?

Yesterday, our own Andy Katz chronicled several coaches' turns with the NCAA's mock selection committee exercise. The NCAA wanted to give coaches the same access and transparency to the process that many hoops writers, including myself, have experienced in recent years; typically, media members walk away from the exercise chastised, with an understanding just how difficult the selection committee process is. (Annoyingly, that couldn't be stressed more by the NCAA during the exercise: "This is really hard! Until you make your own bracket, you have no clue!" This case is a bit overstated. The process is difficult and time-constrained, sure, but it's not molecular physics.)

Anyway, I digress. The point is that Phil Martelli shared a really interesting idea with Andy, an idea worth considering, if not implementing outright. That idea:

The consensus seems to be that the opening-round games would remain in Dayton, Ohio. But Martelli said Saint Joe's athletic director Don DiJulia suggested that they move them to historical buildings like the Palestra in Philadelphia or Phog Allen in Lawrence, Kan., to give the games even more meaning.

OK, so Martelli actually cribbed the idea from his athletic director. But no matter! Good ideas like this need no defined origin. In the big scheme of the tournament, this isn't a big deal. It would be a small tweak to the format involving teams that aren't likely to make it past the first round of the NCAA tournament anyway. But it would be a fun tweak, and the NCAA should totally go for it.

The only question is which four "classic" arenas you'd choose. Phog Allen and the Palestra are a good start. Hinkle Fieldhouse is a must. I'd put in a vote for Cameron Indoor Stadium, too, giving the four play-in games at least something resembling geographic dispersal -- West (Phog Allen), East (Palestra), Midwest (Hinkle), South (Cameron), though it would be nice to find a classic West Coast gym to add to the list. (New Mexico's Pit is certainly quirky, even if it's not "classic.") In any case, this should totally happen. It's a quick, minor, unimportant change, but it would be fun both for fans and for players at small schools who might otherwise never have a chance to play a college basketball game in one of the sport's truly memorable venues. Let's do it.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- With just one look from teammate Trevon Hughes, Jon Leuer knew what was coming.

Wisconsin had the ball, trailing Wofford by a point with the clock dwindling under 30 seconds. Leuer flashed out high, ready to set a ball screen for Hughes. But Hughes told him to "go flat," meaning head to the baseline. And that's when the two made eye contact.

"I knew then that if my guy came off, he was going to find me," Leuer said.

That's how it happened, too. Hughes drove into the lane, drawing a double team that left Leuer open in the corner. Hughes delivered the pass, and Leuer drilled a 17-foot jumper with 17 seconds left as the fourth-seeded Badgers held off No. 13 seed Wofford 53-49.

The two-man game worked all day for Wisconsin. Leuer had 20 points and Hughes scored 19, with the rest of the team adding only 14. But if the Badgers want to win more than one game in this tournament, they'll need more than just a pair of contributors.

Continuing a troubling trend that started in the Big Ten tournament loss to Illinois, Wisconsin struggled to get anybody other than Leuer and Hughes going. They combined to go 14-for-29 against Wofford while the rest of the team shot just 6-for-35. Against the Illini, the supporting cast was only 9-of-34 from the field. Third leading scorer Jason Bohannon is mired in an awful slump. He missed all four of his shots against Wofford and is 2-for-20 in his last three games.

"People game plan to not give up the three and that's his game," Hughes said of his backcourt mate. "He's going to come around, and I feel sorry for whatever team we play when he does."

Maybe, but until then the Badgers are living on the edge. If Wofford had made more than one of its seven second-half free throws, or if the Terriers' Cameron Rundles hadn't lost the ball out of bounds with 4.9 seconds left, Wisconsin might already be done. Hughes acknowledged that his team has to play a whole lot better against Cornell on Sunday.

This was a weird game in a lot of ways. Wofford couldn't make a shot most of the first half, and then it couldn't miss. The much smaller Terriers outrebounded Wisconsin 37-30. The Badgers had only four turnovers, but only dished out three assists.

"Sometimes it doesn't always go as scripted," Leuer said.

Luckily for he and his teammates, the most important play of the game developed just as he thought it would.

This is my latest Twitter mailbag, in which the fine denizens of the college hoopsosphere hit me up on Twitter with questionings ranging from the serious to the, um, less so. Hope you like it. Thanks to everyone for the fun questions, especially @DevineBoston, @bryanhickman, and @TreyKerby.

Oh, and sorry about the shiner. I'm getting really sick of that thing.

Syracuse's Jim Boeheim, Kentucky's John Calipari, Temple's Fran Dunphy and West Virginia's Bob Huggins have signed on with Lexy to offer their free audio posts to you over the phone or online.

Basically, you can get texted when one of them has something to say and then call in or log on to listen for some spin.

No, yelling back at them won't work if you got one of these texts during a nervous halftime break or moments after a first-round loss.

But what if one of them comes calling during a championship parade?