Snubtown, USA- On March 15, 2015, the NCAA Selection Committee announced their choices for the annual NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. As usual, there were teams that felt that they deserved to be in the tournament who found themselves on the outside looking in. Normally this is limited to just a few teams. This year, however, an anonymous poll was conducted with all 279 teams that were left out to see if they felt that the selection of teams was fair. The results were surprising. Members of every single team polled believed that their team had earned the right to be a part of the tournament.
Said an anonymous player for the San Jose State Spartans, “You know, I feel that we went out there and played in all of our games. We even won 2! I think that there is no way that you can’t put us in the tournament with our resume.” The Spartans finished 2-28 with the worst record in the country.
Added a player from the 2-27 Florida A&M Rattlers, “I think we proved ourselves by going 2-6 to finish the season. If that isn’t tournament worthy, I don’t know what is. Besides, my mom says I’m a winner, and that matters more than all the rest!”
Delegates from all 279 snubbed schools and one high school in Alaska have formed a committee to reform the college basketball tournament to become a “better, fairer” system. This committee, who named themselves the Committee for the Equal Rights Selection of Teams for the Men’s Basketball Tournament, or CERSTMBT for short. Their current proposal involves a tournament that will be as long as their name that will involve all of the 337 Division I basketball teams and the high school team from Alaska. There will be a variety of random byes and play-in games as well as a double elimination format that could effectively cause the tournament to stretch out for months.
While this format seems unlikely to come into existence, members of the CERSTMBT believe that if it were put to a vote among all Division I schools, they would pass it with an overwhelming majority. Another proposal involves replacing the traditional season with a round-robin tournament in which each team plays every other team in the country to determine the true champion. Said Committee Chairman Doug Samton, “It sounds complicated and impractical, but it will at least be fair.”
