THE NEW REPUBLIC

28.03.2008

A More Perfect Tournament: Gary Hoenig

Of course March Madness is great. "The best spectacle in sport." "Three weeks without equal." Blah blah blah. Not content to leave well enough alone, we want to know if it can be better. We're in search of a more perfect tournament. So, we asked a few friends of the magazine if they had any ideas for improving the NCAAs. Here's what Gary Hoenig, editorial director and general manager of ESPN Publishing, thinks we should do.

Doubling the number of teams in the tourney is fine, but what about relegation? I mean the practice in soccer of forcing bad teams out of a higher level of competition and into the next level down. Translation: Your New York Knicks and your Miami Heat in a play-in game to see who gets to stay in the NBA next season. The loser? Hello, Mount St. Mary's! Sure, the NBA season still has a dozen or so games left by mid-March, but face it: None of those remotely matter for the truly bad teams, except to determine their lottery position in the draft. With the added threat of relegation, you could prevent those teams from tanking ... uh, I mean "taking a long look at younger players" in meaningless games. And imagine the Knicks next season, preparing for a long slate of games against Marist, St John's, and Manhattan, not to mention recovering from their second-round tourney loss to Drake. Now that's entertainment.

--Gary Hoenig

Posted: Friday, March 28, 2008 5:34 PM with 1 comment(s)

Comments

You must be logged-in to comment.

Not a subscriber? Click here to get a digital or print and digital subscription to The New Republic!

Crock1701 said:

While that would be deliciously evil punishment for the Knicks, I think it makes more sense for big conference college football. There there's so much domination by the Big 6 BCS Conferences in terms of Bowls and money, it would be huge. It of course would require each conference to partner up with a local lesser conference (like Pac 10 with the Mountain West or Big 10 with the MAC) so that Duke or Vandy Football might clear the way for a rising star to crash the big conference. From an economics point of view though, that'll never happen because a) Conferences are for more than one sport and b) No members of a conference would vote for a way where they'd potentially lose that money. Relegation will always remain a Euro phenomenon.

March 28, 2008 10:16 PM