I don't recall ever hearing about the "College Basketball Tournament" before this year. No offense, haven't heard much about it this year, either.

I think it's pretty likely that the VCU Rams will go down in history as champions of the final CBT (which may or may not be the only CBT ~ I'm not sure), now that it looks like the NCAA behemoth tourney will be growing to 96 teams next year.

The venerable National Invitation Tournament (NIT), which is actually one year older than the NCAA championship, and was for years a more desirable and arguably more prestigious post-season destination for college hoops teams, will undoubtedly shut down if the NCAA expansion to 96 teams goes through. The fledgling CBT tournament is hardly likely to survive if the NIT can't make it.

I think the NCAA field was plenty large enough back when it stood at 32 teams ~ IF we believe that the object of the exercise was simply to determine a national champion. Every team that won its conference, large or small, had a chance to prove its worth, plus every unaffilliated team with a legitimate claim at "number-one" status. Sure, some excellent teams that finished second in their respective leagues didn't make the cut, but that's what the NIT was for: a team that got off to a slow start and failed to win its league could be frozen out of the NCAA's "official" championship, but win its way to the NIT's final rounds, played in the high temple of basketball, Madison Square Garden, and prove their worth to the world.

But, as we know, the NCAA basketball tournamment is not longer primarily concerned with determining a national champion. Thanks to the influence of TV money, and the terms of coaching contracts, it's no longer so much about which team wins the tournament, as it is about which teams get in.

So now we have a ridiculously watered-down field, featuring 48 additional teams with little chance of surviving the "opening" round (which will now become the second set of games after a newly added round of 32 "play-in" games), and essentially no chance at all of continuing to win and advance more than once or twice more. All this, so that their coaches' agents can argue that "he got our team into the tournament," and so that the NCAA can collect ad revenues for an additional couple of days of mostly-pretty-lousy televised games.

And in the meanwhile. of course, we get the death of the alternative tournament(s) that once provided a showcase for good solid up-and-coming teams that might well complete for the "real" championship the following year.

Why would anyone start a new college basketball post-season tourney in this era? Whether this CBI, or CBT, or whatever it is, is brand-new this year, or if it had already been founded a year or two earlier without my noticing, it was never going to do very well competing against the already-floundering NIT. If the NCAA expansion to double its current size goes through, as seems inevitable, any and all other competing tournaments are dead as doornails.