March gets more madness next year

There's no doubt that the selection of teams for this year's NCAA Men's D1 basketball tournament was a complete debacle, with both the tournament selection committee and ESPN commentators proving that they have no special (or normal) ability to decide which teams belong in the tournament.

Today, the NCAA announced a series of changes designed to improve the tournament. First, the tournament will roll back to 64 teams next year. This will avoid the possibility of a team like VCU, which really doesn't belong in the tournament, embarrassing the committee so spectacularly.

Second, the NCAA will no longer use a committee to select the teams or seeding to match up teams. Instead, teams will be selected by the well-respected BCS selection algorithm and randomly dropped into the bracket. This should result in more interesting and competitive games as well as increased revenue for Las Vegas sports books.

Third, the tournament will have eight regionals instead of four with each regional having eight teams. The geographic region names have been a challenge, with the majority of teams seeded outside their region. To avoid that problem, the NCAA announced that the new regions will not be geographically based and instead we will have:

• Dogs – canines such as Huskies, Huskies, Bulldogs, and Bulldogs 
• Cats – felines such as Wildcats and Bobcats, as well as Lions and Tigers
• Bugs – insects and orther arthropods, such as Spiders and Hornets
• Reptiles – including both Alligators and Crocodiles
• Birds – both fictional, like Jayhawks, and real, like Cardinals and Geoducks
• Primates – including Gorillas and Pirates and everything in between
• Fish – including Dolphins, Penguins and Banana Slugs
• Legends – recognizes the conferences that can't think of good names and includes all the inanimate or otherwise perplexing mascots, including Zips?, Heat!? and Orange!?? 

The regions will be matched up differently each year on a rotating basis. So one year, the Dogs will fight the Cats for a Final Four berth while the next year, the Dogs might face the Birds. Teams that don't fit into any of the above categories will be arbitrarily and capriciously assigned to one using the same process that the selection committee has been using for seeding up until now.

UPDATE: After posting this I learned that the Miami Heat is, in fact, an NBA not an NCAA team. My bad.

UPDATE 2: Sorry, this is all made up. Except the part about the Big Ten (sic) having a Legends division.