Having done its best to confuse America's college basketball fans for the past few years, the NCAA is finally bringing some common sense back to March Madness.
The organization announced Monday that the round of 64 and 32 will officially be known as the first and second round again beginning in 2016, a long overdue decision that already is being praised across social media.
The NCAA began referring to the round of 64 and 32 as the second and third rounds after the tournament expanded to 68 teams in 2010 because it didn't want the "First Four" to feel like a play-in round. Not only would attendance and TV ratings drop if the "First Four" wasn't viewed as part of the real tournament, the coaches whose teams lost those games also might not receive the usual job security boost that comes with making the field.
The problem with the nomenclature has been that the public has proven easier to confuse than to fool. Most everyone recognizes what the First Four is — a two-day event that whittles two No. 16 seeds out of the field and pits the last four at-large candidates against one-another. Renaming the round of 64 and 32 has been maddening, however, because of the confusion created when some reporters, analysts and fans adopt the new names and others stick with the old, more logical ones.
"The purpose of referring to those games as the second and third rounds was to sway people to use first round or better yet First Four when referencing the games in Dayton,” NCAA vice president for men's basketball Dan Gavitt said. "No one in our membership was fond of ‘play-in’ games because of the implication that you had to win those games to make the tournament, which couldn’t be further from the truth. People now understand the First Four is the start of the tournament, so it will continue to be branded as such, and the weekend games will now go back to being the first two rounds."
Why would the NCAA wait until 2016 to make the switch? Ironically, it's to prevent more confusion. Tickets to the 2015 NCAA tournament have already been printed and purchased, so changing the names now might have led to more problems than it was worth.
Having to wait until 2016 is a small price to play for sanity being restored. Never again will any of us have to hear the phrase "second round" and wonder whether the game in question took place in the round of 64 or the round of 32.
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Jeff Eisenberg is the editor of The Dagger on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at daggerblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
from Yahoo Sports http://ift.tt/11w4unj
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