WHEN THE SPORTS BUBBLE POPS. A USA Today investigation of the positional arms race in college basketball suggests that it's much harder for a program such as Butler or Northern Iowa, let alone Cornell, to become a presence in the national tournament than it is to make the odd appearance.

Schools with less budgetary cushion, such as Northern Iowa, can't keep spending their way into a regular basketball tourney spot. "I think the hurdle is more in sustaining than it is in achieving," Northern Iowa athletics director Troy Dannen says.

There is anecdotal evidence to this effect elsewhere, with, for example Wisconsin-Milwaukee supplying Bo Ryan to Wisconsin and then supplying Bruce Pearl to Tennessee.

A Brian Goff post at The Sports Economist suggests the basketball tournament is not as much of a them-that-has-gets organization as USA Today suggests.

The decade long performances of programs such as Gonzaga, Memphis, Xavier, and Butler are very impressive. To find programs averaging more than a win per year, one has to look at places like Kansas, North Carolina, and Duke. Their performances stand above past national champs such as Louisville or Louisville and way out front of champs-turned-strugglers like Arkansas. The talking heads who like to refer to how Gonzaga hasn't beaten X or advanced past the Sweet 16 in more than a decade just don't get it.

While my interests here lie mainly with individual team performance, some interesting conference comparisons jumped out also. For example, five different teams from Butler's relatively obscure Horizon league have won NCAA tourney games, four from Gonzaga's WAC, and a whopping seven from the Missouri Valley have won. More competition at the conference level, such as the MVC, both helps and hurts individual teams -- helps by playing better competition, raising seeds and hurts by making it tougher to make the tournament.

With students and trustees questioning increased spending on sports in the face of falling state support and broken endowment funds, whether the relatively obscure conferences can continue the positional arms race remains to be seen. The table in the post, however, suggests that the tournament seeding committee consider sending fewer middle of the pack teams from the so-called power conferences and more second-place teams from the mid-majors to the field of 65 or 68 or whatever it is going to be.