Hardly a year goes by when something patently unfair doesn't happen in the NCAA men's basketball tournament.
And 2026 is no exception.
In the "Sweet Sixteen," the Nebraska Cornhuskers, the 4-seed in the South region, get to play the ninth-seeded Iowa Hawkeyes on Thursday — after which the Houston Cougars, the region's 2-seed, will have to play 3rd-seeded Illinois. Both of these games are being played at Houston's Toyota Center, the home court of the NBA's Rockets.
But why isn't Houston playing Iowa and Nebraska playing Illinois?
Shouldn't a higher seed get an easier path to the Final Four?
And please, don't hand me this "bracketology" garbage. Fairness should always be paramount because it gives every team an incentive to earn as high a seed as possible.
(Up to a point: if the tournament was "re-seeded" after every round, "March Madness" would be extended into May — and no one wants that.)
The way it should work is that the surviving teams should be re-seeded only twice: entering the Sweet Sixteen, and again entering the Final Four (if two 1-seeds win their way into one semifinal, while a 7-seed and an 8-seed win their way into the other semifinal, it would hardly be fair to have the two 1-seeds play each other in the semifinal).
If four teams are headed to the same venue in the next round, there is no reason not to have the best surviving team play the worst surviving team, and to have the second-best surviving team play the third-best surviving team.
And in this computer age, it will be easy to automatically program the "brackets" so that every participant's predictions get "re-seeded" at the start of the Sweet Sixteen, and again at the start of the Final Four (and the very term "re-seeding" needs to be unceremoniously retired).
Plus, conference tournaments can actually be made to mean something tangible, even going so far as to give runners-up in conference tournaments an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament would be highly recommended, providing such a team finished with a winning record (clearly these teams have better personnel than the "champion" of some cow conference).
While what has happened to Illinois this year pales in comparison to what happened to USC in 1971 (or even to St. John's in 1989: they were snubbed by the NCAA that year while Robert Morris did get to go, then St. John's won the NIT title) — but an inequity is still an inequity, especially when it can be done away with so easily and without a scintilla of controversy.
Next week, the NFL's owners will meet in Phoenix. One of the topics to be discussed is a change in the playoff seeding, so that teams that win some lousy division would no longer get home field in the wild card round — which ties in with this matter: does a Penn get a higher seed than a UConn in the NCAA tournament just because they won their conference while Big East runner-up UConn did not?
Either talent means everything — or it means nothing.
The NCAA needs to stop messin' with Mr. In-Between.
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