NCAA Basketball Tournament Teams, and the Economy

In a sense, economy already factors into NCAA Basketball Tournament pairings. The Selection Committee already utilizes a "pod" placement system where they place #1 seeds as close to their home geographic region as possible to facilitate students, alumni and local fans of that school. This generates more ticket sales, as fans of the #1 seed, typically plentiful in number, can more easily go to the games. Also, the 1 seed faces the easiest opponents and the least chance of getting eliminated early, maximizing the ticket sales potential for both the 1st and 2nd rounds.

For most everyone else, seeing their team in tournament action can require lengthy travel, pricey hotel reservations and ticket purchases. While the NCAA Tournament has always generated a ton of money, the recession bit into everyone's pocketbooks. Many fans that otherwise would may opt not to travel and see their team, especially if said team is a middle or lower seed whose chance of surviving aren't great. Even if the venues cut ticket prices, many would still not opt to make the trip.

Tournament ticket revenue could drop dramatically this year as a result, and that hurts everyone involved: the schools and the NCAA.

While helping the economy isn't the NCAA's responsibility, they can help reduce their own potential loss in revenue by adjusting how they select and allocate teams to each region in the NCAA Tournament.

- Adhere to the Regions as strictly as possible in placing teams. The NCAA divides the tournament field into four regions: East, Midwest, South and West.

However, outside of the #1 seeds, teams frequently end up in a region well outside of their actual geographic region, in order to balance the field. You may see Gonzaga in the East Region despite being based in the Pacific Northwest, or Georgia playing in the West Region despite coming from the Southeastern U.S.

The NCAA Tournament Selection Committee can help themselves by keeping as many teams as possible as close to home as possible. Yes, long travel is inevitable for many teams: Pacific Northwest tournament probables like Gonzaga and Washington take long road trips no matter where they go due to their location. Bottom seeds (14, 15 and 16 seeds... typically small conference champs) offer little choice in where the NCAA can place them to maintain a competitive balance: you don't want 3 low-major schools clumped in one region while a stronger team in another region gets slapped with a 16 seed. And the NCAA must distribute the 1, 2 and 3 seeds as evenly as possible to ensure competitive balance between the top teams. The 1 seeds will play close to home, but sometimes you have to ship a good team across the country to give them the 2 or 3 seed (and the resulting easier bracket) their talent and performance level deserves.

But you can do a lot with the teams in-between. The difference between the 7th and 10th seeds is often minimal, and you can even make frequently-even comparisons between 5th, 6th, 11th and 12th seeds. Take all those teams in the middle and keep them within their geographical region as much as possible, even at the expense of some competitive balance.

There is also no need to worry about diluting attractive matchups: Part of the idea of the NCAA Tournament is that its large mish-mash of teams creates all kinds of matchups on its own. Given the quality of most of the teams in the tournament and that all of the nation's top teams are involved, chances are likely you will end up with a host of alluring, entertaining matchups.

Put all the Western U.S. teams in the West and Midwest Region. Put those SEC and ACC teams in the South and East Region. Keep the Big Ten teams in the Midwest and East and avoid putting the Big East in the West Region.

Given the risk of running fellow conference teams into each other, spread them out across the regional brackets as much as you can. The committee already tries to avoid conference mates meeting before the regional final, but go ahead and loosen up completely. If two SEC teams have to meet in the 2nd or 3rd round, fine. If you must give an 8-seed-level team an otherwise unwarranted 6 or 10 seed to keep two SEC teams far apart, then fine. The Committee already gerrymanders the seeding like this to some extent, but they should do it to keep teams close to home rather than balance teams competitively. The following step can help cut down on this problem:

- Cut down on bulk at-large bids for power conferences. Spread some of those bids out across lesser but competitive conferences. We don't really need 7 or 8 ACC or Big East teams in the NCAA Tournament.

Look at it this way: no matter how talented they are or how tough their conference plays... does the 7th best team in a 12 team conference have much of a justified argument to play for the National Championship, when they couldn't outplay six other teams in their own conference?

Give some questionable but competitive Mountain West and Missouri Valley Conference teams an extra at-large bid or two. If a top team in a mid-major conference gets upset in their conference tournament, go ahead and let them in anyway. Maybe they're borderline and might not deserve it when you weigh all the competitive factors as much as that 8th best ACC team. But maybe their schools and conferences could use the extra economic boost of the money from a tournament bid a lot more than the ACC and Big East teams do.

In fact, a 17-12 bottom-half ACC team stands to gain more as a school from playing home games against mid-majors in the NIT than they do from a possible 1st round tournament loss against a Top 20 club hundreds or thousands of miles from home. Not only do they get ticket revenue but they save the cost of traveling to and lodging in a major city (where lodging prices are likely higher due to demand from the tournament). In fact, shuffling more of those borderline power conference bubble teams into the consolation NIT would increase the quality of that tournament and improve its revenue as well as the revenue of its participants.

*

Doing these things wouldn't completely solve the economic issues, but they will help the NCAA cut the potential revenue loss for the tournament and NCAA schools, as well as making the games as accessible as possible for as many fans, alumni and student bodies as possible. And the difference in competition will be minimal.

In fact, more mid-major schools in the tournament can add intrigue to those often forgettable 8-vs-9, 7-vs-10 and 6-vs-11 matchups in the 1st round, not to mention generate excitement if one of those schools makes a fabled Tournament Cinderella run.