One Shining Moment: Applaud NCAA's 68-Team Field

Exactly 21 days after NCAA basketball director Greg Shaheen's mixed martial press conference on the subject of a 96-team tournament field that, at the time, seemed as certain and unwelcome to come in April as tax day, the NCAA proved it understands the goose that laid the golden egg isn't simply a how-to guide in avian metallurgy.

In parlance that fortunately still has its meaning, this was the ultimate 16-over-1 upset.

After three anxious weeks of awaiting an unwieldy 96-team field, the NCAA announced Thursday that March Madness would only grow by three new teams.

Somehow, some way, the good of the game won out over the green of the dollar.

And there was much rejoicing.

"A number of people assumed we were going to 96, when in fact we were conducting our due diligence," NCAA interim president James Isch said on a lengthy teleconference with reporters. "Sixty-eight was relatively easy to understand and much less complicated than going to 96, which was where most of the interest was placed."

Ninety-six teams was assumed because the NCAA and its surrounding power brokers had gone great lengths to make it seem fait accompli. The ballot had been cast, we were led to believe, the future writ as largely and mind-numbing as a 96-team bracket. Shaheen gave a sputtering, bumbling explanation of how the supersized field would work, as full of gaps in speech as it was in logic, but unrepentantly pro-96.

Writer John Feinstein thundered away against Shaheen like Tom Cruise's Lieutenant Kaffee cross-examining a kid BSing his way through a book report. Still, Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany called the half-thought out plan "inevitable" that week and CBS broadcaster Leslie Visser told a Tampa radio station that she had been told by CBS higher-ups that 96 was almost certain for 2011.

All in all, the idea went over so poorly that it made Duke's jeered national championship victory seem like a Miracle on Ice moment by comparison.

Yet in the end, Thursday's announcement made the 68-team's field come-from-behind victory apropos, a last-minute buzzer beater grabbing victory from the 96 teeth of defeat.

Neither the NCAA nor CBS' Sean McManus would explain exactly why the league backed off its 96-team madness at the last moment, saying only that the network's needs were met.

Perhaps they listened to the wave of public opprobrium, the universal distaste for tinkering with what may be the nation's most loved sporting event. Or maybe the addition of television partner Turner Broadcasting create enough inventory by broadcasting each of the tournament's now 67 games.

Or maybe the duo just ran out of sacks to stuff the money in.

Thursday, though, motives took a backseat to sheer relief.

With meager expansion, the NCAA tournament retains what makes it so special, its neat packaging as a three-weekend event, a bracket that doesn't have to be printed on something the size of wallpaper instead of sheets of paper, and most importantly, its exclusivity.

Shaheen had asked the Thursday before the Final Four that a 96-team field not be called "watered-down" which was supposed to be a plea for open-mindedness but only sounded only like a challenge for the thesaurus.

A 96-team field would've welcomed North Carolina, a reward for one if its worst seasons in program history. It would've welcomed Miami, which won just three of its final 14 regular-season games, and Connecticut, which slumped to the finish.

Heck, even the New Jersey Nets could've qualified for a 96-team field.

But now, 96 is a relic of the past another terrible sports idea that fortunately never came to fruition, like moving the Yankees out of the Bronx or an American soccer league.

If there were any cause for concern, it was were the two words that that dangled off the promise of a 68-team field like the lit fuse on a stick of a dynamite.

"For now."

With the tournament's multimedia rights secured through 2024, however, the decision will largely be the NCAA's. Perhaps the tournament will eventually expand. After all, 68 teams is likely one full day of play-in games. Maybe the NCAA will turn the temperature of the water up slightly and add four sites to the first day with four games each, increasing the field to 80 without substantially altering the format.

But there will be no extra money in it, at least not for another decade and a half, with media rights already negotiated, so if the NCAA expands, it will do so under the banner of improving the tournament, instead of as obvious a money grab as sports has ever seen.

It could cynically seem like the NCAA's "New Coke" moment, when the brief introduction of a new product served as a reminder of how beloved the old product was, making the expansion to the slightly ungainly 68-team field a much more welcome change that it may have otherwise been.

Of course, if the NCAA has ever been that clever before, no one has noticed.

And it doesn't cure all the ills of a sports world busy figuring out how to make the next buck at least as much as how to make the next play.

World Series baseball games still don't start until well after Joe Paterno's bedtime. The NBA playoffs run on a geologic timetable. And the BCS is its own shining metaphor of sports' contempt for its fan.

And the good feelings, and the pitch-perfect 64-ish team field won't last forever, or perhaps even the 14 years of the deal, but, for one day celebration is the order of the day.

After all, in the NCAA tournament, happiness comes one shining moment at a time.