The NCAA Tournament is one of the (few) singularly perfect sporting events currently available. So, naturally, the assholes in charge want to mess everything up.

Their plan does not involve any minor changes, either, but rather the addition of fifty percent more teams and an extra weekend, 96 teams in all and four weekends lost on the march to a Division 1 Men’s Basketball Championship.

There are no benevolent reasons behind the move, either. It comes down to money, lots of it, the NCAA an organization willing to tarnish the one event it gets right every year for a chance at mega dollars. According to the AP, the NCAA has until July 31 to dissolve the remaining three years and $700 million of its current March Madness contract with CBS. Should it choose to do so, and then add the extra weekend, the TV deal would perhaps not grow substantially larger ($700 million, after all, is quite a bit of money), but they would be able to bring in another network, probably ESPN, and sell sixteen more games as part of a more lucrative multi-network package deal.

Everyone involved stands to make a killing off this deal. Except, of course, the players or their families, but that’s neither here nor there. If you hear the kids themselves tell it in the commercials running almost every commercial break (or the actors who look like college kids cast in the NCAA’s self-aggrandizing commercials, that is), almost all of these athletes will go pro in something other than athletics. Why that should make us feel better about their exploitation every March, I’m not sure, but I digress.

The NCAA would not be adding any conferences the way they did the last time the tournament expanded, back in 2001, to accommodate the creation of the Mountain West Conference by virtue of the Play-In Game. We would simply get another fifteen Play-In Games. The NIT would be dissolved, and we would be offered more opportunity to waste more of our time watching college basketball than ever before.

It’s not as though these games would be any sort of great opportunity for teams like Dayton or Seton Hall, either. These guys might win one game, maybe two, only to be rolled by somebody with superior talent, much the way Gonzaga or Missouri (two of the lesser at-large teams) did in this year’s second round. In fact, you would think adding 31 extra teams to the NCAA Tournament would negate much of its magic, starting with no great need for, or suspense leading up to, Selection Sunday, on through to a host of games between bad teams no one regards highly, and later the prospect of tired players heading into perhaps their fourth weekend of intense basketball once the Final Four rolls around.

Coaches love the new plan, as it would give more gentlemen the chance every season to say they took their team to the NCAA tournament. But much the way the expansion of the Best Picture category at this year’s Oscars, from five to ten nominations, served little purpose other than bestowing honor upon movies that didn’t quite deserve it (I’m looking at you, District 9), there’s a reason Dayton and Seton Hall, not to mention Memphis and Ole Miss and all the rest of the teams in the NIT, didn’t make the NCAA Tournament: because they didn’t deserve to.

And what, pray tell, will happen to our conference tournaments with this plan?

Trivial concerns like Honor and Prestige, Distinction and Excitement, don’t matter to the folks at the NCAA, though. Dollars do. So in a few years you very well may have to say goodbye to the current, perfect set-up for March Madness. It will take you hours to fill out your bracket, and your odds of doing well will spiral down an order of magnitude or two. The tournament itself will become an unmanageable slog in which teams that aren’t that good (who in their right mind would claim Wichita State, Troy, Texas Tech, Illinois State, Tulsa, William and Mary, Coastal Carolina, or Stony Brook deserved to make this year’s Big Dance?) are trotted out in a dog-and-pony, veritable pre-tournament “showcase” that will mean nothing two weeks later. In the current system, at least one of those teams wins the NIT, which might not mean a hell of a lot anymore but still gives them a championship to play for, the ultimate Booby Prize but a prize all the same, one worth more than eventual destruction by superior competition.

As it stands now, teams earn the right over the course of the season to be included in the Field of 65. There are fairly strict guidelines, and less than 1/5 (65 out of 347) of Division 1 teams make the tournament. National sports attention is gluttonously gobbled up by CBS and the NCAA during the tournament’s three-weekend duration, and those first two days of action when the field goes from 64 to 32 are among the happiest two days of the year for American sports fans.

There is no reason to mess with any of that. But the NCAA, being the soulless money-grubbing organization that it is, has “found” one, an old friend they know well: cash, dollars, moola, scratch, benjis, greenbacks, etc.

They want that money, and we live in a capitalist society, so whatever. Nothing screams money, apparently, like Stony Brook-Dayton, live from an empty arena in San Jose, broadcast on cable by ESPN, the game somewhat affiliated with the NCAA Tournament but happening so far back from the finish line that it may as well be just another March basketball game, the first of a possible seven either would have to win to secure a National Title.

Or anyway, it does to the NCAA.