Chansky’s Notebook: Ruining The Suspense?

What the NCAA and CBS are doing is, in a word, useless.

Why would the NCAA Basketball Committee decide that, beginning on February 11, it will reveal the tournament seeding, as it stands on that day? And then every week after, show how the selection committee has updated that seeding?

It must be for sponsorship money, since everything else in sports is these days.

This takes a lot of the fun out of what has become a holiday of sorts, Selection Sunday, after the regular season and conference tournaments come to an end. Fans sit by their TVs, blank brackets in hand, and wait for the field to be released.

Now, we will know, or sort of know.

Is this a move to devalue, or compete with, the so-called bracketologists like Joe Lunardi and Jerry Palm? To get in on the action of trying to predict the seeds? Because that’s exactly what this is – guess work – when you consider what is still to come AFTER February 11: the biggest conference match-ups, seeding for conference tournaments and conference champions to be decided.

Sure, CBS and the NCAA will factor all that in as they move forward with their weekly brackets, just like the College Football Playoff poll is updated each week once it is released in mid-season. But that has a different dynamic to it – The Who’s-In dynamic. That poll ultimately unveils the Final Four in football. Basketball is doing a cheap knock-off since the hoops Final 4 is determined on the court.

While this is all merely speculation written on it until the final seeding is announced on Selection Sunday, the fact that it is coming from the Selection Committee will give some teams a sense of confidence and other teams a false sense of confidence. And it will stoke the debate over how much importance the February games will have, plus the conference tournaments, compared to what happened before the first mid-term bracket was revealed.

The NCAA Tournament is one of the few things that college athletics has right these days. The playing, the jockeying for position, the waiting for Selection Sunday works well as is. Why mess with it?

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