[NU Sports] NCAA Poised to Expand to Field of 96; NIT Slated for Extinction

[Ivars Embrekts]

Personally this book has made me very sympathetic to these "bottom 
conferences" so I would suggest they have the same chance they have 
always had, not some sort of "small conference play-in".

A solid read - a few years old, though.

http://www.amazon.com/Last-Amateurs-Playing-Division-Basketball/dp/0316278424

If there's any doubt about John Feinstein being one of sport's true 
believers, /The Last Amateurs/ readily dispels it. After years of 
smartly dissecting our games at their highest levels in bestsellers like 
/The Majors/, /A Good Walk Spoiled/, and /A Season on the Brink/, he 
returns to dissecting our games at their /purest/ level, ground he first 
staked out quite stirringly in /A Civil War/, his chronicle of Army-Navy 
football.

In /The Last Amateurs/, he mines the 1999-2000 season of Patriot League 
basketball. Given the high-stakes, high-profile, and often dirty world 
of college hoops these days, Feinstein comes up with a remarkably 
refreshing place to visit, a sporting environment short on scandals, 
prima donnas, and sneaker contracts, but long on a pure passion for the 
game that complements achievement in the classroom. In the league's 
seven schools--Bucknell, Lehigh, Lafayette, Colgate, Holy Cross, Army, 
and Navy--academics come first, the hardwood second. These are campuses 
populated by students who happen to be athletes, not athletes stopping 
off on the way to lucrative careers in professional sports. Indeed, 
these are young athletes who have their post-college focus on the rest 
of their lives, not the NBA. Sports, for them, builds character, not 
bank accounts.

Still, the Patriot League is a Division I conference, with its champion 
earning an automatic berth in the NCAA tournament. It takes the games 
seriously--often, as Feinstein reveals, heartbreakingly so--even if it 
doesn't necessarily play to ACC, SEC, Big 10, and Pac-10 standards. 
Feinstein's interviewing, skillful as ever, brings the players, coaches, 
and administrators of the colleges in this league to full form, making 
/The Last Amateurs/ a rarity among sports books--a smart volume about 
smart people with their heads and priorities pointed in the right 
direction. Like the conference itself, it's in a league of its own. 
--/Jeff Silverman/ /--This text refers to the Hardcover 
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316277010/ref=dp_proddesc_1?ie=UTF8&n=283155> 
edition./



Tom Maycock wrote:
>> Actually there are 32, but one of them is new and won't
>> qualify for an auto bid for a while (if ever).
>>     
>
> Yikes. That is a problem. 
>
> How about having the bottom 16 conferences duke it out in a preliminary round, and seed the winner along with 31 other teams in the real tourney? 
>
> Not sure if that's actually an improvement on a 64 team tournament....
>
> Tom
>
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