Why Can’t Football Imitate Basketball?

At just about this time each year, when the republic is leveling an eye on the NCAA basketball tournament, form players miss John Wooden.

During Wooden’s incumbency at UCLA, folks usually knew who was going to win the NCAA. John goes to the tournament 12 times, bags 10.

Form players like this.

“Life today has enough uncertainties,” they say. “You can’t count on junk bonds. You can’t count on banks, oil tankers, bottled water or baseball. It would be nice again not having to worry about the winner of the NCAA.”

But of course, the suspense persists, no school since Wooden’s retirement in 1975 having won the NCAA back-to-back.

Therein may lie the secret to this event’s staggering growth in affairs d’jock, burgeoning today as a major force.

The populace is going coconuts over college basketball. The Harris people run a poll last year in which they ask, “If you had to choose, which sport would you say is your favorite?”

And when the results are tabulated, the top five turn out to be, in order, pro football, pro baseball, college basketball, pro basketball, college football.

The growing popularity of college basketball leads to a problem each night on the TV news. You flick on the machine and what do you see, unfailingly, during the sports segment?

You see footage of basketball games. TV is responding with tape to the polls, despite the carefully reasoned argument here that all that’s required are the scores.

One piece of basketball footage looks the same as the next. It is possible, in fact, that TV keeps using the same footage and viewers don’t know the difference.

It’s like Johnny Carson’s theory on fruitcake. He insists there is only one in the world, and it keeps changing owners.

But the rise of the NCAA tournament has been colossal, leading you to ask how the NCAA can do such promotional wonders with postseason basketball--and make such a botch of postseason football?

The recent football season ends, and, as it usually happens, everyone in the bar is in a beef, this time over whether the national champion is Miami or Notre Dame.

Bowl games comprising the college football postseason are also cheapened by promoters on the hustle and by the corporate invasion, teams pandering to oil companies, insurance companies, automakers, citrus growers and the like.

But college basketball? The NCAA runs its own postseason show, starting its buildup in early March and advancing to a tidy finish in early April.

Beginning its tournament with only eight teams, the NCAA escalated to 16 on its way to 32.

It would then expand to 40, asking, “Why are we skimping?”

Jumping to 64, it also would develop, through most of the membership, conference tournaments in which winners would earn places automatically in the big tournament.

Only the Big Ten and the Ivy League have completely rejected the conference tournament, asking quizzically, “If we play a conference season to determine a champion, do we need a tournament afterward to determine the same thing?”

That’s so logical it’s sickening.

But if the month-long basketball circus the NCAA has created with 64 teams runs into April, it could expand to 128 teams and carry the tournament toward Mother’s Day.

At the last count, by someone whose name hasn’t been disclosed, 1,250 colleges were playing basketball in the United States. If all their personnel, it was figured, were stacked atop each other, they would rise 20 miles.

“Do I have a halftime show for you,” a fast-talking packager would tell television. “I can build you a pyramid that will make the world forget anything in Egypt.”

For economic reasons, many of the schools playing basketball have dropped football over the last two decades, concentrating on basketball, which is cheaper to undertake and easier to manage.

More important, it has come to give the little schools exposure they never got in football. Connecticut, Georgetown, Providence, Loyola Marymount, La Salle, Xavier, Nevada Las Vegas, Louisiana Tech? You’re talking prime time entertainers.

The NCAA has a runaway winner in its tournament, leading you to ask again how it can put together such a piece of custom jewelry, bringing its basketball season to a satisfactory close, and foul up the finish of football.

In football, you see the NCAA as a coloratura starting her aria grandly--and falling through the drum.