Another Ingenious Idea

And this one I dare anyone out there to tell me it isn't sheer brilliance.

So most of you have probably heard by now that the NCAA plans to expand the NCAA college basketball tournament from the current field of 64/65 teams out to 96 teams, most likely giving the top 32 seeds first-round byes, while the middle 32 seeds would compete with the bottom 32 seeds in a new round of play that would likely happen on Tuesday-Wednesday of the first week of the tournament prior to the resuming the regular 64-team format we are used to starting on Thursday of that week.

There will be many effects to this, most of which are in my view not good for the sport of college basketball. But of course one of the effects will be more games, which means more games televised on tv, which ultimately means more money for the NCAA as part of the highly lucrative broadcast deal it has secured for decades now for March Madness. But one other effect not talked about much right now is that expanding this field to 96 teams will effectively kill the NIT Tournament.

Now, I'm not someone who actually care about the NIT Tournament. It already means next to nothing, and when you thin out the talent on the teams involved such that we're looking at teams that are not in the top 100 teams nationally, I can't imagine anybody giving even the one crap that they might care about the NIT as currently constituted. No, if when the NCAA officially approves expansion of March Madness to 96 teams, the NIT Tournament as we know it will be done, finito, vamoose.

And this is where my ingenious idea comes in. Remember a few years ago when the ACC raided the Big East, stealing Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech in a football-focused money grab, totally throwing a wrench into the entire conference system in organized Division I college athletics today? What did the Big East do? Did they sit around and mope about this admittedly greedy and piggish behavior coming out of the littledicks in the ACC? Did they cry to mommy about how unfair life is and what a poor hand had been dealt to them? No. Instead, they stepped right outside of the box and shook things up more than ever by basically raiding other conferences, thereby in the span of just a few weeks building the greatest basketball conference this country has ever seen, and now the Big East is every year the best conference in basketball while the ACC -- let's be honest -- sucks the big one. In both football and basketball, lately.

I think the NIT needs to take a page out of the Big East's book. The NCAA Tournament is about to effectively kill the NIT Tournament once and for all. But for whoever the stakeholders are in the NIT brand, I have the best idea ever for them, one that will change the face of college sports forever and which could enable the NIT to snatch tremendous victory right from the jaws of defeat much like the Big East did in the face of adversity a few years back. The NIT should affirmatively cancel the annual NIT Tournament, but instead announce right along with that cancellation announcement the formation of a new national invitation-only college football tournament, to be played right after the BCS bowl games are finished every year.

That's right. The NIT College Football tournament. It's invitation-only, but unlike in basketball where the best teams already go play in the NCAAs, there is no college football tournament yet to speak of in college. The NIT could fill that void. They can wait until after the bowl games are done, after the BCS, and then they can invite the 8 best teams in the country -- using a committee comprised of university officials and NCAA and football experts to help make the tough choices, of course -- and finally we can have a national champion in that sport.

The NIT has a chance to take a huge step in the face of what is otherwise tremendous adversity. Now is the time.