GONE-FETTI: David-Goliath NCAA tourney matchups like Gordon Hayward and Butler’s 2010 title-game loss to Duke may soon be extinct. (Reuters)
GONE-FETTI: David-Goliath NCAA tourney matchups like Gordon Hayward and Butler’s 2010 title-game loss to Duke may soon be extinct. (Reuters)
Pick your favorite NCAA Tournament upset. Go ahead, there’s no right or wrong answer.
Princeton knocking off defending national champion UCLA in 1996? Bucknell’s 2005 flip of Kansas? Davidson’s 2008 stunner over Arizona?
Those games are what make the NCAA Tournament the greatest three weeks of sports in America. Those games stay with us forever.
And that’s good, because the NCAA Tournament as we know it may soon be a thing of the past — like the NIT, once the reigning postseason tournament.
Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby, one of the smartest guys in any room when it comes to NCAA matters, yesterday spoke the most articulate — and frightening — words we’ve heard this summer on the future of college sports.
Bowlsby said it was time for transformative change in the NCAA leadership.
“This is not a time when trimming around the hedges is going to make very much difference,” Bowlsby said at the opening of the Big 12’s preseason media days. “It’s probably unrealistic to think that we can manage football and field hockey by the same set of rules. I think some kind of reconfiguration of how we govern is in order.”
Reconfiguration has replaced realignment as the most polarizing issue in college sports. It’s the R-word.
What Bowlsby is saying is what Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski feared when he sat down with The Post about a month ago and was asked if he thought the “Big Five” power conferences would split from the NCAA.
“What happens when people get more money?’’ Coach K asked. “They move out of the neighborhood. They form their own neighborhood.’’
The new neighborhood would comprise the schools from the five power conferences: ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC and Pac-12. They’re the conferences that are getting filthy rich TV contracts.
And if that happens, the blue-blood schools in those conferences — Arizona, Duke, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, Syracuse, UCLA — the ones that often get the top seeds, the ones we love to see toppled, won’t be in the NCAA Tournament.
They would be in another neighborhood, a neighborhood with all Big Fellas and no Cinderellas.
Big-time college football already lives there. It’s dragging basketball with it.
“Football is really outside the NCAA,’’ Krzyzewski said. “They go by the NCAA rules, but they don’t share money with the NCAA.’’
The big-time football schools share little with the rest of their NCAA brethren, which is why a split seems inevitable. As Bowlsby said, “It’s unrealistic to think that we can manage football and field hockey by the same set of rules.’’
Football needs its own set of rules, its own revenue sharing, its own playoff, its own enforcement department — one with real teeth — and its own organization.
“I think right now our national organization is under fire, there isn’t any question about it,” Bowlsby said. “And yet, I’m not hearing anyone say we ought to find another organization.’’
Not yet. But the day is coming when the football power conferences will secede. And March Madness will never be the same.