Sixty-eight teams, the most ever, will play in the 2012 NCAA Basketball Tournament that begins tomorrow night in Dayton, Ohio. The tourney has been at 65 teams in recent years, meaning that both USF and the University of California, who will play Wednesday night at 9:10 p.m., might likely have been teams left "on the bubble" if 2011 rules were still in existence.
Jerry Palm, the publisher of CollegeRPI.com, tells the New York Times that all of these teams that were added to the tourney are "highly flawed."
“That’s a function of the 68-team field. You put three more teams in the field, you’re going to have 10 teams that could compete for those three spots…..You’ve lowered the standard for getting into the tournament. And this is what you get.”
Nevertheless it's huge news for Tampa Bay area college basketball fans, as USF makes "the big dance" for the first time in two decades.
This article appears in Mar 8-14, 2012.