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"  Let us face facts. ESPN, the Worldwide Leader in Selling Stuff, does nothing better than hype its products. These include the games themselves, highlight packages of pieces of the games themselves, the various beads and trinkets stamped with the Official Merchandising Partner seal of the games themselves, shows in which sportswriters holler about the games themselves, and Chris Berman. ESPN could sell mange as a skin care regimen. It could sell botulism as a sandwich spread. It can sell, is what I&amp;#039;m saying. So, next year, or the year after, or whenever the NCAA men&amp;#039;s basketball tournament moves on over to ESPN and expands to a ninety-six-team field, you can be sure that all the people currently carping about the situation will be drowned out thoroughly by a raging, roaring torrent of hype and bullshit. (But enough about Digger Phelps.) And, as soon as the new tournament starts, I guarantee you that hardly anyone will remember what all the fuss was about. The only difference most people will notice is that the copiers in a couple of million offices will run out of paper faster, due to the fact that the new bracket may take up two sheets of paper instead of one. That being the case, we ought to state for the record what a truly terrible idea this is. And let&amp;#039;s not be naive. This is going to happen, and it&amp;#039;s going to happen on ESPN. (For reasons too arcane for anyone except business-school dweebs and broadcast executives, the NCAA can opt out of its ludicrous 11-year, $6 billion broadcast deal with CBS after this year&amp;#039;s tournament.) It&amp;#039;s going to happen despite the fact that the idea has been universally scorned everywhere outside of the NCAA itself and the fraternity of basketball coaches, who see it as a way to keep some of their less-than-competent brethren employed by fudging the measurement of success that making the tournament has become. In a way, it is very similar to the endless debates about campaign-finance reform. The reason we don&amp;#039;t have campaign-finance reform is that the people who least want it are the same people who will have to vote to enact it. The reason we are going to have a ninety-six-team NCAA tournament field despite all the huffing and blowing against it is that the only people who really want it are the people perfectly positioned to make it happen. And all they have to do is ride out the rage until the first ball goes up in the first game of the first revamped tournament. Then, they&amp;#039;re home free. What we have tipping off on Saturday, then, is the last real NCAA tournament. This year, North Carolina, Indiana, Connecticut, and UCLA all missed the field, most of them by a considerable distance. That&amp;#039;s a total of twenty-two NCAA titles on the outside, including the last one. In their place, we had Northern Iowa and St. Mary&amp;#039;s, and we have Butler in the Final Four. Somewhere in the bowels of the NCAA bureaucracy, someone thinks this is a bad thing, that what the event truly needed is the regular participation of the sport&amp;#039;s major brand names. Because this move isn&amp;#039;t about making sure there are more Butlers and more Northern Iowas. It&amp;#039;s about making sure that it&amp;#039;s almost impossible for one of college basketball&amp;#039;s marquee players to play badly enough not to be included. The coaches are on-board because their golf buddies need to keep their jobs, so you could call the proposal The Mediocre Coaches Protection Act of 2010. In a ninety-six-team field, it is very certain that North Carolina, an unattractive bunch of underachieving high-school stars that couldn&amp;#039;t even beat Dayton to win the NIT, would have made the tournament. Connecticut likely would have joined the Tar Heels, and the Huskies were as brainless a squad as ever laced them up. (Indiana and UCLA just, well, stunk. They&amp;#039;d have been bubble teams in a 180-team field, a concept that we should not mention, lest it give people ideas.) A sixty-four-team field is large, but it&amp;#039;s also still something of a challenge. Which is why the four teams still standing amid the tattered bracket-sheets of a stunned nation can look back some day and be proud that they did what they did in the last actual NCAA tournament. Butler is the surprise, but it shouldn&amp;#039;t be. It is regularly labeled a &amp;quot;mid-major,&amp;quot; which now is nothing more than a marketing slogan to cover every conference except the ones that play BCS football, and promulgated in the main by (yes) ESPN. However, Butler plays in a good conference and, more important, it plays a national schedule that is regularly ranked in the top fifty in the country. (This year, it was No. 42.) It always plays well in the tournament. Based on its performance over the past several seasons, Butler is every bit as much of a &amp;quot;major&amp;quot; as West Virginia or Michigan State are. As it happens, both of those teams come into the weekend handicapped by the loss of their starting point guards; in Michigan State&amp;#039;s case, Kalin Lucas also happens to be the team&amp;#039;s best player. In both cases, though, the way the teams have to play in order to win makes them almost hopelessly unattractive to watch. I think Butler beats Michigan State \u2014 or, perhaps, my esthetic sense of the game demands it \u2014 by building a working margin with about eight minutes left in the game \u2014 Look out for Willie Veasley, a poor man&amp;#039;s Vinnie Johnson \u2014 and then closing it out from the line. Which leaves us with Duke, the presence of which in another Final Four, not to put too fine a point on it, is nothing more than evidence of the foul hand of the living Satan at work in the modern world. That aside, these Blue Devils had the easiest road to get here, and they are the only one of the top-seeded teams to do so. (Drops into the voice of Emperor Palpatine.) Everything wonderful that&amp;#039;s happened in this tournament \u2014 Northern Iowa&amp;#039;s dispatching of Kansas, Butler over Syracuse, and the defeat of John Calipari&amp;#039;s Rent-a-Center squad at Kentucky \u2014 has happened according to the design of whatever dark force rules the cosmos to make things easier for Duke. The Devils are smooth and slick and they really can shoot, but West Virginia simply doesn&amp;#039;t get blown out by people. It plays much too hard for that. If Joe Mazzula, the only point guard WVU has left, and a guy who talked some serious smack about Duke after his team beat them a couple of years ago, can stay in the game, I think the occult designs are confounded and the Mountaineers move along, and then Butler beats them for the national championship of the last NCAA tournament that will matter to teams like, well, Butler. There&amp;#039;s some justice in that, I think. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a7214/college-basketball-brackets-040210/>