Jon Rothstein proposes interesting tweak to NCAA’s First Four

For the king of college basketball coverage, the right number of teams for the NCAA Tournament is 68.

If you favor an expansion to 76 teams like Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark does, don’t bother Jon Rothstein. The CBS Sports college basketball insider doesn’t want to hear about it, even if the NCAA has already engaged its media partners, which includes Rothstein’s employer.

CBS and TNT Sports executives might have cautioned against potential tournament expansion, saying they don’t want to do anything that would diminish the NCAA Tournament’s specialness. But even the thought of expansion doesn’t sit well with Rothstein, who called it a “bad idea.”

“I’ve said this time and time again — and I’m going to say it again — Jeff Goldblum said this in the film The Lost World, circa 1997, that ‘Taking dinosaurs off this island is the worst idea in the long, sad history of bad ideas,'” Rothstein explained on the Awful Announcing Podcast. “Expanding the NCAA Tournament would usurp that.”

Rothstein is willing to refine the tournament, but adding more teams? That’s where he draws the line

“The NCAA Tournament should be tweaked in this way: if you are good enough to win automatic qualifier for the NCAA Tournament by winning your conference tournament, you deserve to be in the Round of 64 on Thursday or Friday,” Rothstein tells host Brandon Contes. “And then, what I would like to see — I’m not just saying this because I’ve been fortunate enough to work on the First Four for a couple of years now in Dayton — I think it would be better for the tournament if the First Four in Dayton would be the last eight at-large teams, to create more compelling matchups to get people juiced for the first two days of the event. That’s my opinion.”

Rothstein is adamant that the number of teams in the NCAA Tournament is OK, just the way it is. And if he has to use a Jurassic Park quote to get his point across, so be it.