Or at least, it seems that way, if the unconfirmed reports of NCAA Tournament expansion are to be believed.

The NCAA wants to expand to either 68 or 96 teams, depending on who you believe.

The 68-team bracket would expand the number of ultra-popular play-in games between teams you've never heard of from one to four; the 96-team bracket would create a whole new round for bracketologists to go crazy over.

The 68-team bracket isn't a terrible idea in theory, but only if you punish the last eight at-large teams by having them face off with each other. Wouldn't you much rather watch (say) Clemson vs. Minnesota for the right to take on a No. 5 seed Vanderbilt, rather than Alabama A&M-Chattanooga for the right to be destroyed by Kansas?

Of course, the NCAA geniuses will just match up the worst eight teams in the field, creating four more games that nobody will watch.

So this, to me, makes the 96-team bracket more likely. Let's do some quick math.

There are six major conferences (ACC, Big 10, Big 12, Big East, Pac 10, SEC) who suck up most of the at-large NCAA Tournament bids now. Those six conferences are made up of 73 teams at present. If you allow for a generous average of 2 bids for the other 25 leagues, at least 46 of those 73 teams (and this is about as low as it would feasibly go) are making the new-and-improved NCAA Tournament. That's roughly two-thirds of all the 'BCS' conference teams - or adding ~20 bubble teams to the tournament proper, and another 20 middling teams to the bubble.

Finish 7th in the Pac-10 (maybe not this year, anyway)? You're probably in. The 11th-place team in the Big East? Here's your bid to the national championship tournament. (I would laugh if the NIT, CBI and CollegeInsider.com tournaments all continued, sweeping up every .500 team in America.)

The tournament as constructed currently is perfection. The NCAA is going to tinker with it, even though the NCAA is a non-profit (ha!) governing body (ha!) that must balance academics (ha!) with athletics.

And yet they won't expand the NCAA Division I football playoffs from 0 teams to some reasonable non-zero number. I hate you, NCAA.