Modest proposals on how to make a 96-team NCAA basketball tournament not stink

The NCAA is going to do it. Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany basically said so Wednesday when he used the terms "probable" and "likely."

They're going to increase the NCAA men's basketball tourney from 65 to 96 teams.

Naturally, thinking people hate it, seeing it as the money-grab it is, and nothing more.

The NCAA had hit on the perfect event, the three weeks, two games per week (as long as you keep winning) tourney with the bracket that any monkey could understand. That's proven by the tens of millions of people who fill out their own bracket before each tourney.

But the bracket will soon have a bunch of extra racket, as 16 play-in games will be held to determine half of the final 64 teams.

It's garbage. It means one more game to win for mid-majors, decreasing the chances of them getting out of the first week and into the Sweet 16. They'll have to win three games in the first week. Brothers and sisters, that's hard. Emotion carries you just so far, and then you need size and depth.

But you can't fight City Hall. So here's what I demand, er, propose.

1) All regular-season conference champions get byes into the field of 64. The 32 teams that battle on the Tuesday before the tourney really gets started should be at-large teams from conferences large and small. That will now include conference-tournament champions.

Of course, corruption will be rampant. In the Big South or Southern or Southland conferences, for instance, there's nothing to stop the regular-season champ from rolling over with its NCAA spot assured and the league wanting its tournament champ to also get in the field. Deal with it, NCAA.

2) Give no league more than four teams in the field of 64. If the Big East gets eight teams in again next year, four of them have to play in the opening round. If you can't do better than fourth-place in your league, you don't deserve any special favors in the NCAAs.

3) Keep the NIT, but don't set the field until the first week of the NCAAs are over. Then make it a super tourney, with the best 16 teams no longer in the NCAAs. Most will be let down after failing to continue forward in the big tourney. Again, deal with it.

4) Shut down the conference tourneys on the Saturday before Selection Sunday, and have the selection show four or five hours earlier than it has been. The reason: With less time to print and fill out brackets, those hours will be needed by everyone with the tourney starting on Tuesday instead of Thursday.

Plus, there's that pesky little matter of travel arrangements for the 32 teams that would be playing on Tuesday.

5) Have wild man Gus Johnson working the Final Four for CBS instead of Jim Nantz. Give Jim an extra week to prep for the Masters. Have Gus take us all the way to the net-cutting on the Monday night of the title game.

If ESPN steals the NCAAs from CBS as is possible ... steal Gus, too.

6) Please, please, puh-leeze ... shorten the timeouts during NCAA games from the current length to something that resembles a normal basketball game. If Jerry Garcia had still been alive, you could have held full-length Grateful Dead concerts during the timeouts this year.

7) No more domed stadiums for the Sweet 16. If you're adding this extra layer of tourney, give the world a break and play everything but the Final Four in real basketball arenas. The atmosphere is so bad in the domes compared to arenas. The game just looks different, and not as good.

8) Finally, use Las Vegas and New Orleans as first-round sites every year. This year's first-round sites included Spokane, Buffalo, Jacksonville and Providence. Ugh.