TWO DAYS OF PLAY-IN GAMES. Phil Miller finds a Columbia Tribune sports columnist who might be exaggerating to make a point, but who gets the elephantiasis of the bracket exactly right.

The play-in game is like the appendix of the tournament. You can live with it but don’t need it. And you wouldn’t want 32 appendices, which is the way it would work with a 96-team bracket. The top 32 teams — the only ones with a prayer of winning the tournament — would get a bye and the other 64 would square off in two days of televised tedium before the bracket is reduced to something that can comfortably fit on a sheet of 8½-by-11 paper.

What this is about, of course, is television dollars. The NCAA can opt out of its current 11-year, $6 billion deal with CBS and secure an even more lucrative contract, probably with ESPN. The tournament becomes a bigger cash cow if there is more of it to love.

The biggest proponents of expansion are coaches, who have a vested interest in keeping their own jobs and seeing the lousy coaches they can dominate keep their jobs, too. They complain that only 19 percent of the 347 teams in Division I make the tournament, which means the coaches of the other 81 percent risk losing their jobs.

To which, I would reply, Bill Self wouldn’t save his job if he regularly squeaked into a 96-team tournament as a No. 24 seed. But if it makes you feel better, you’re all winners. You all get a ribbon. Except you, Alcorn State, with your 0-24 record. You’ve really let yourself go.

Only a few teams each year have legitimate gripes about missing the tournament. They are usually midmajor schools that win their regular-season conference title and get upset in their conference tournament. But they had a chance to win their conference tournament. Schools in every conference except the Ivy League — whose regular-season champion gets an automatic bid — have a fighting chance to win their way in to the NCAA Tournament regardless of how crappy they’ve played the previous four months.

At The Sports Economist, Professor Miller lays out the tradeoffs.

One of the tradeoffs the NCAA needs to consider is the simultaneous increase and decrease in interest this would cause. The expanded tournament would redistribute the bubble, putting some teams on it and taking others off it. Is the net marginal effect on fan interest positive?

More to the point, where would the advertising revenue boost come from, if the play-in games had fewer viewers than the public access channel, and if the round of 32 had on average more mismatches?

In addition, this proposal would lead to a basketball version of grade inflation. While getting an A is great for the individual student, it's not necessarily true if everyone gets A's (the fallacy of composition). A given grade no-longer reflects the willingness and ability of a student to do quality work.

That's a longer way of stating my "But does 'made the seventh game' [the play-in round] say anything about a coach that 'finished in the middle of the conference' doesn't?"

Similarly, the more teams that get into playoffs, the less interesting the playoffs become. This also has to be accounted for when thinking about the net marginal effect on overall fan interest.

That's the probable lower ratings for the play-in and round of 32 at work. There's a further substitution effect at work, one that is hard to tease out. But sports fans have budget constraints. More tournament games on offer has the potential of reducing attendance at regular season games. And the players have to work harder for no more pay.