Ouch... my bracket (The mid-major quandary)

The Final 4 is set and it's the first Final 4 since 1993 that doesn't include a 3-seed or lower. This is quite a sharp contrast to last season, where for the first time in the modern 64-team era, not a single 1-seed reached the Final 4; and 11-seed Cinderella George Mason was everybody's sentimental favorite.

A lot of people will argue over the next few days whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, whether this means college basketball is progressing forward or progressing backwards. How about progressing sideways?

People like to think of the advent of the "mid-major" powerhouse as a modern construct. But what's really happened is our perception of what makes a mid-major has changed.

You may have heard the stat that only six mid-majors received at-large bids this year, the lowest amount in a long time. And this is true, but don't forget that the Atlantic-10, Mountain West, WAC and Conference USA conferences are included in these statistics (Conference USA was created in 1995 when two previous mid-majors, the Metro and Great Midwest conferences merged).

Look at some of the mid-majors through the years who have reached the Final 4 long before George Mason: Utah in '98, Massachusetts in '96, Cincinnati in '92, UNLV in '87, '90 and '91 and Memphis in '85. Everyone knows Larry Bird took little Indiana State to the title game against Magic Johnson and Michigan State in '79. But did you realize who else made the Final 4 that year? The Pennsylvania Quakers, probably the final Ivy League team who will ever reach the Final 4.

If you want to go back further, the 60's and 70's were littered with mid-major Final 4 teams: Drake, Jacksonville, UNC Charlotte, New Mexico State, Wichita State and Dayton, to name a few.

The eight-year drought for mid-majors between Utah reaching the Final 4 in '98 and George Mason reaching the Final 4 in '06 was the longest such drought for mid-majors in tournament history.

So what happened to the mid-major?

Well, for starters, TV happened, and it made the tournament a big-time event. The NCAA tournament has become one of the most telegenic sporting events year after year, and this means big money. But this big money isn't going to everyone, as you might suspect. This multi-billion dollar TV contract is divided amongst the schools in a manner that systemically creates a level of institutional monetary discrimination against the smaller schools. For starters, half the revenue goes to conferences based on their performance in previous tournaments. So conferences that perform well year after year, like the ACC or Pac-10 get fatter, while the smaller conferences are stuck in a cycle of lower funding.

The irony of this is that the NCAA tournament on TV exploded thanks to Larry Bird and Indiana State. To this day, the 1979 championship game between Indiana State and Michigan State remains the highest rated college basketball game in TV history. It's no coincidence that the 1980 tournament was the first to feature TV broadcasts of the first two rounds of the tournament.

But can we still perceive Indiana State as a mid-major? A Cinderella? The Celtics were allowed to draft Larry Bird 6th overall in the 1978 draft thanks to a rule back then that teams could draft players before their college eligibility was up (imagine if that rule still existed). Can the public really get behind a team as a Cinderella which featured arguably one of the five greatest players in basketball history (albeit arguably the greatest white player in basketball history)?

There's no question we love our underdogs in this country. Rooting for the underdog is a chance to regrasp our historical remnants of beating the odds. We were George Mason in the Revolutionary War and Indiana State in the War of 1812, but only 200 years later we were Duke in Vietnam and Kentucky in Iraq. Everyone knows Americans have it better than the rest of the world in almost every aspect of life, so we affiliate with our underdogs where we can find them, and sports is the underdog's ultimate milieu. We love our Rockys and we love our Miracles on Ice. We love our Glory Roads and we love our Hoosiers (the fact that Glory Road was an underdog story of all-black players taking on the all-white heavy favorites and 20 years later Hoosiers was a completely racially transmuted exposition is probably a section of our mid-major conscience that deserves its own separate writing).

So look back at those mid-majors who reached the Final 4 between Indiana State and George Mason. Though they all technically count, in the eyes of the American sports fan, they were not true underdogs. UNLV had NBA talent in Larry Johnson and Stacey Augmon, not to mention a shady coach and shady dealings with Las Vegas ne'er-do-wells. Cincinnati in '92 had a galling superstar (Nick Van Exel) and an even more galling head coach (Bob Huggins). UMass in '96 was ranked #1 for much of the season and was led by a future NBA star in Marcus Camby. Utah in '98 might have been the closest we've had in this bunch to a Cinderella (and it's probably not a coincidence they were the "whitest" team out of all of them). Most of these teams in retrospect feel less like underdogs and more like big fishes in little ponds, technical mid-majors that were really just waiting for a BCS conference to come along and snatch them away (it actually happened with Cincinnati joining the Big East in 2005).

Turns out we love underdogs, but only up to a point. The NCAA tournament exists as an unique construct, truly the only major sporting event where the so-called little guys get to take their best direct shot at the big boys. But once one of those little guys breaks through and makes it happen, we only want more, and we want it on a bigger and grander scale.

After Indiana State glued everyone to their television sets, the real modern era of the NCAA tournament began. So we sat, and we waited for another mid-major to break through to the Final 4. We saw 14 seeds inexplicably reach the Sweet 16 (Cleveland State in '86 and Chattanooga in '97) and we clamored for more, we clamored for great things. We watched 15 seeds pull off stunning first round upsets and we asked for even bigger and better things.

In the late 90's, thanks to high school players taking an increasing interest in skipping college ball to jump straight to the pros, mid-majors busted back through the gates by reaching the Elite 8. First it was Gonzaga in '99, then Tulsa in '00 and Kent State in '02. Once could say these teams paved the way for George Mason finally breaking through in '06.

And then what were we left with? The final frontiers for mid-major basketball in the tournament were a mid-major in the Final 4 and a 16-seed upsetting a 1-seed. We've now seen one and not quite yet the other. So how are we supposed to be interested in the Winthrops or VCUs of the world reaching only the 2nd round?

Mid-major success in the NCAA tournament is not a modern construct. Similar to teen pregnancy or drug use, it's something that's always been there, and if anything it's on the decline, only now our concept of it has changed. Our perception is different. Some people will always call things an "epidemic" for better or worse. But an epidemic is only created in how you perceive it.

We love our underdogs. We need our underdogs. Next year, we'll probably have another underdog make a run, because college basketball, like anything else in life, is cyclical. And we'll all act surprised because we want to act surprised.

The culture of sports fans is a nation of suckers, in the true P.T. Barnum sense of the word, and when our underdogs no longer satisfy us we will create new ones. And if the new ones come up short we'll construct different ones in our own inspired image.

There is no progressing forward or backwards in this formula. Only different variations of sideways.