March Madness: Should the NCAA scrap the ridiculous weak conferences and make it truly the best 64 teams?

… current process is a joke 

Start with this premise: The battle for any NCAA athletic championship should include the best teams in the country.

For Div. I men's basketball, that means that the 64 best teams in the U.S. should be playing for the title.

Instead, a team that has a power rating as low as 263rd in the country -- or worse -- has a shot at earning an NCAA berth, even if it requires a play-in game.

That makes no sense. 

The bottom feeders

Take the conferences at the bottom of Jeff Sagarin's power ratings. Here they are with their top team and power rating:

28. Southland (193, New Orleans)

29. Big South (84, Winthrop)

30. Big Sky (171, Eastern Washington)

31. Big West (156, UC Irvine)

32. Northeast (211, Mount St. Mary's vs. 263, St. Francis)

33. Southwestern (166, Texas Southern)

34. Mid-Eastern (175, NC Central)

Note that only one of those horrible conferences has a team with a power rating of under 100. The others are well into the 100s.

The most woeful is the Northeast Conference, which includes St. Francis and Robert Morris, which would probably lose to most top Div. II teams. The top ranked team is Mt. St. Mary's, which has a 211 power ranking. MSM will play St. Francis for the championship, and the Red Flash have a 263 rating. Pathetic.

Understand this, too. A number 16 seed, which all of these teams would probably be, has never won a game in the NCAA tournament [not including play-in games that are not really tournament games].

That is ridiculous. Here are some of the teams on the bubble according to USA Today:

Wake Forest, ACC 18-12, 33 (now considered in)

Syracuse, ACC 18-13, 39 (in)

Rhode Island, A-10, 21-9 52 (out)

USC, Pac-12, 23-8 56 (in)

California Pac-12, 19-11 51 (out)

Any of those teams is far superior to the conference winners from any of those bottom feeders. It makes no sense to send them packing to the NIT or some other god-forsaken tournaments so that a team with a 150 or 211 power rating could take its place.

Rationale for selection

The NCAA's rationale is that this allows teams that would never have a chance at a berth to earn one. But, is that fair to the others who are much better than these teams are? This is done for TV ratings, pure and simple.

This goes against what I have believed for so many years, but I never looked at it from an equity standpoint.

Why not take the conference winners from the top half, 17 conferences, and the best of the rest -- the truly 47 best teams in the country beyond that?

Then make a section like the FCS in football and put the woeful conferences in it to play for an NCAA-lite title. That would be more realistic.

For now, this does not make sense.