Mike Celizic

It’s the first Sunday of March. And that means college basketball. It means Northern Iowa vs. Wichita State, a game most sports fans wouldn’t think twice about.

But this was no longer a game with little meaning to the casual fan. To the winner went the Missouri Valley tournament title and an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.

It's a game that would normally be lucky to make ESPNU worthy of national exposure on CBS and the attention of every sports fan, no matter how casual.

This is the beauty of March. Wichita State and Northern Iowa are important. The Ivy League is important. The MAC, the WAC, the Pac-10, Atlantic 10, Big 10, Big 12, Big West, Big South, Big Sky and the Big East; the Ohio Valley and Missouri Valley are equally important. Every one of them gets at least one team in the NCAAs.

All but one has a conference tournament. Northern Iowa won, so the Panthers are in. Wichita State took a seat on the bubble. The Ivy League doesn’t have a tournament, so it’s regular-season winner gets in. This year, that’s Cornell. Also already in are Winthrop, East Tennessee State and Murray State.

For the rest of this week, we get conference tournaments nearly around the clock. When the smoke clears on Sunday, the tournament committee announces the brackets.

In some ways this week is even better than the NCAA tournament. There are more teams playing more games, and there’s more at stake. Most have to win to get in to the big dance. This is not a time of year when any team leaves anything in the locker room. It all gets spilled on the court.

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For all but the nation’s elite teams, every game is a Game 7. There is nothing like it in sports. Game after game and day after day, the team that loses goes home. The effort is furious on both sides of the court, and the games never stop coming at you. It’s the sports equivalent of a film festival, one great show after another.

The NBA playoffs are not as intense. The games are shorter, and the shot clock is 35 seconds as opposed to 24 in the pros, which further shortens the game. Every possession becomes more precious, which ratchets up the intensity.

Some college teams could play four games in four days. Most winners will play three games, sometimes in as many days. You will never see pros asked to give so much in such a brief time.

And after this week is done and the field of 65 is announced, we get three days to get our office pools together. Then it’s Thursday and Friday, the two best sports days of the year, when we get 32 games at eight sites in two days. It’s the same feeling Homer Simpson gets at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Like the conference championships, they’re all fought tooth-and-nail: 32 Game 7s over two days. Where does it get any better than that? Don’t bother answering. It doesn’t.

There will be upsets somewhere among those 32 games, perhaps one or two big ones. With any luck, we’ll be able to fall in love overnight with some school we’d never heard of before.

There is increasing pressure on the NCAA to expand the tournament field form 65 teams to 68, 80 or even 96, which would add a round to the action and even more excitement to the mix — or so we’re told.

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The rationalization for this is that there are too many 20-win teams that end up not making the tournament, partly because there are so many automatic entries for conference champions, and partly because the selection committee doesn’t think they’re good enough.

The selection committee is right. The tournament doesn’t need more teams. It’s not as if the added teams would be threats to win the tournament. Most would be threats to win one game. A few would win two. One every several years would win three. None would ever win the tournament or play for the championship. No 64th-seeded team has done that. No 96th-seeded team will, either.

So if you’re not capable of winning it and didn’t win a conference, shut up and be happy there’s the NIT.

The NCAAs and conference championship week is already the best month of any in sports. You can’t improve it. Don’t even try.

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