Upgraded playoff not without its glitches
You pick up your phone, glance at the screen, and the device unlocks. By mindless muscle memory, your thumb stretches toward the icon of an application it opens a dozen times per day.
This time, though, your thumb freezes. You notice the app’s icon is a different color than it was yesterday. The logo has changed. And you are struck by a jolt of sudden dread.
“Oh, no,” you say to yourself. “I hope they didn’t ‘improve’ it.”
What you have grown to realize, subconsciously or not, is that “improvements” are not meant for you, the user. Whether it’s a music player, or a score tracker, or a delivery service, or an all-too-addictive social media site, every app reaches a point where updates don’t enhance your experience anymore.
They just make it easier to make money off of you.
You don’t like these changes, but the people who designed them aren’t worried about that. They know you’ll get used to them, and they know that you’ll grow to accept them, and they know that eventually you’ll forget you’re stuck with a less helpful, less enjoyable version of the program/game/ site that hooked you in the first place.
And this, in a roundabout way, brings us to the folks who run college sports.
Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen reports all over the place about how College Football Playoff officials are discussing expanding the event to include 14 teams (even before the 12-team era starts this fall), and also about how the NCAA basketball tournament is destined to grow well beyond its current 68-team
field.
As you might have guessed, these changes aren’t being proposed because the powers that be are interested in improving the quality of the events. They also don’t believe expansion is something desired by players, or coaches, or you, the fan.
In fact, listen to what NCAA president Charlie Baker told ESPN this week about “March Madness.”
“Most of the people who follow college sports think the NCAA tournament in basketball is perfect, right?” Baker said. “So anything that’s done to change, it needs to be done with care and consideration.”
Those two sentences give the whole game away, don’t they? After all, if something is widely regarded as perfect, why would it need to be changed at all? And if changes are made to
perfection, doesn’t that, by definition, ensure the product gets worse?
What Baker left unsaid is what we all know to be obvious. The reason schools want to mess with one of the most popular, beloved sporting events in the Western Hemisphere is that they think they can make more money off it. The
richest programs want to get richer, so they’re reportedly considering reducing the number of small-conference automatic bids (which would eliminate much of the David-vs.-goliath matchups people enjoy) or expanding the tournament field to as many as 128 teams (which would lead to a bunch of blowouts
and further dilute an already-diluted regular season).
But this probably is going to happen, for the same reason the College Football Playoff might go to 14 teams (with as many as four automatic bids each for the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference). It will create more tickets to sell, and more
commercial breaks to fill. Simple as that.
And look, I’m trying not to be a middle-aged man yelling at a cloud here. Not all change is bad. Some progress is real.
It’s great, for instance, that players now are freer to cash in on the billion-dollar-per-year enterprise that has enriched so many coaches and administrators over the years. And any version of a football playoff is better than the old Bowl Championship Series system we used to have.
But there comes a time when constant tinkering leads to diminishing returns, not necessarily for university coffers, but for the overall good.
Extra games mean extra wear-and-tear on the bodies of players who can sign name, image and likeness deals but still aren’t allowed to be paid as employees. Extra games mean bigger TV rights deals, which whether you realize it or not, are paid for by passing
the cost to your cable and streaming bills. And at some point, the extra games aren’t interesting enough to justify the downside.
Even so, the changes will continue. The next time you open your favorite app on that phone, there will be an ad where there wasn’t one before. Your playlists will have become harder to find, to ensure you see stuff people with money want you to see. Everything you post will be answered by a bot, paying $8 per month for the right to harass you.
Your thumb will be back, though. And a few years from now, when the No. 26 college basketball team in the country opens March Madness against No. 99, in a snoozefest sponsored by cryptocurrency and light beer?
From your couch, as announcers extol the supposed superiority of this update, you’ll have but one wish:
“Please,” you’ll say, “no more improvements.”