We see plenty of tickets sold to all the basketball games each year for the tournament. This would be far fewer teams involved and would already favor schools with large followings.

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A lot of those tickets sold for the basketball tourney are for a "package" of games, in a regional area, and usually held within a couple of days...involving 20,000 fans at the most...It would be much more difficult to continue to shell out $50+ for 3 weeks straight...along with the travel cost for the weekend at each site...Bowl Games deal with 50,000+ in most cases...

Bowl Games still sell better because the bowl sponsors sell the tickets on that the whole Bowl Experience as more of a "vacation".

A school going to March Madness is allotted 500 to 1,000 tickets. With 8 schools at a regional for the first round, and with most of the first rounds in SUB-20,000 arenas (out west, they make do in the 12-17K range), that reduces the local load considerably. BTW, the second games of the weekend often have cheap tickets available from kids whose teams lost in the first round. A championship game ticket is actually easier to come by than a Final Four Saturday ticket, for the same reason. Also, virtually nothing in the way of fan activities is sponsored during regionals.

Meanwhile, the Rose Bowl expects to sell 40,000 tickets to each participating school, and almost always does (a ticket snafu kept down the count of Washington State fans a couple years ago). Out of 40,000 each, the more tour packages sold, the better for them, of course; since March Madness might occur during most spring breaks, the potential to sell those tour packages MIGHT exist, but not with 5 days notice.

Back in 1996, the Cotton Bowl sold 17,000 to Oregon fans and 9,000 to Colorado fans, announced 58,000 attendance (with never more than 40K in the stadium), and the area hotels announced that it was the most active New Year's in memory... probably because the old SWC fans who used to sell it out drove in on game day and drove back the same day. I can only imagine what happened the next year when Kansas State and BYU actually sold the place out, with KSU bringing 35,000. Anyway, the point is that the scale of March Madness is completely different from that of a bowl game.

You're making my point for me, guys. Bowls are HIGHLY dependent on fans traveling from participating schools, meaning that most bowls generate little interest from local sports fans. The same is true for TV revenues. Most bowl games generate little interest from the general sports fan.

In contrast, the basketball tournament generates tremendous interest from the general sports fan & non-sports fan alike. Office pools are legendary. These alone attest to the high level of interest. Regardless of the size of arenas, most of the revenue for the tournament is generated by TV.

By the time you get to the second weekend of the tournament (round of 32/16), arenas are selling out easily. Final Four weekend is normally played in a football size arena & even still they have to hold a lottery, with the lucky winners being drawn from a pool numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

The present bowl system is indefensible. A play-off would greatly increase the interest of the general fan. Such a tournament adds drama & games actually mean something. Of course, the basketball tournament differs in many ways, but it demonstrates the basic principle. Every game is sudden death & every game means something & every team has hope.

Agreed. The fan interest in a playoff system would result in MUCH higher revenues than the current BCS, and you'd think the bowls would be licking their chops at such a prospect.

My ideal would be a 16-team tourney. Conf. champs get an auto-bid, that would leave 5 at-large (that's a large enough field to prevent exclusion of anyone, who could seriously claim to be a contender for No. 1).

First round might be at 8 top seeded schools (only conf. champs could host).

8 winners move on to Rose, Orange, Sugar, Fiesta. These tickets could be pre-sold by lottery, and I DO think they would sell, cause they would be readily scalp-able, after the pairings are announced.

Then semi's and a final game would be at locations picked by the NCAA (bid on like the BB Final Four, and regional host cities).

To make this happen, one powerful entity would have to line up the powers that be (the bowls, the college presidents, etc.), and satisfy everyone that the money would be an increase over the current unwieldy mess. It might mean having to guarantee part of the money. I see maybe a TV network with Kahunas offering this, in exchange for a long-term exclusive TV rights package.

Naaaahhhhh !!!!! Not in our lifetimes.....


The BCS (as almost all posters here agree) is an unmitigated disaster. It is only a system to pair #1 and #2.

I cannot understand all the wrangling over whether Cal or Texas deserved an at-large. Other than the #1 vs. #2 game (USC-OK), what's the point ? Just money !!!! By sneaking in past Cal, what did Texas earn ? Not a shot at No. 1, just BCS money !

It would be relevant to discuss who got into an 8-, 12-, 16- team tourney, if you could then progress through a bracket and vie for the Title. If such a system were in place, I would think Boise St. would be screaming bloody murder.... but what does it mean to grab the low seed in the Current BCS ? Only money.

The proposed 4+1 or 5+1 talked about last spring was far better. Then getting into the bracket provided all teams an opportunity to move on to the title game (admittedly at 8-3, Pitt would likely not be chosen this year, even if they were to destroy Utah), but such a system would be far superior to the current mess.
AND it would add importance to all the games in the round of 8 (or 10), as they all would then have potential National Championship implications. You'd think that would be attractive to these doofuses in charge of each of the 4 "major" bowls, but they can't seem to see the forest for the trees.

Hey, Dave, did you hit the nail on the head! Ignored amidst all the jubilation for a non-BCS Utah making it to a BCS bowl game is the fact that NO non-BCS team will ever have a shot at a national championship game under this current system - no matter how worthy. As you so aptly stated, they just have a shot at a more lucrative, but still meaningless exhibition game.

To simplify the syste even further for a 16 game tournament, let the league championship game for premium 12 team leagues count as a first round game. Let the remaining teams play each other that same weekend. At present, that would be another 10 teams - 8 conference champions & 2 at-large. The result is that such a system would only add 2 weeks during January intersession for 2 teams & 1 week for 2 other teams.

Can't common sense ever come into play in this thing. How do these men at the top of their professions come out with the comments they do on this topic with a straight face? And why do so many people allow their intelligence to be insulted by such remarks?

So you're saying that there wouldn't be office pools for a football tourney? I think gambling would take off even more with a tourney. You'd have individual games to bet on but also an entire tourney.

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