What the NCAA Tourney Could Learn From England's FA Cup

A large part of the allure of the NCAA tournament is the annual emergence of the Cinderella team that comes out of nowhere to captivate the nation. But sports fans have begun to notice that the Cinderellas are disappearing long before midnight. It's impossible for these nobodys to compete with the big guys -- especially since the NCAA lords have begun doing such a competent job of seeding the teams beforehand.

English soccer's FA Cup has exactly the same problem. There's a whole mythology that's grown up around the tournament about how "anyone can beat anyone else on a given day," but it's not really true. At the end of the day, the big teams almost always prevail.

There is something of a way around this -- though we're not likely to see it. The major difference between the two tourneys is that in the FA Cup, there is no seeding. (The games also don't go to neutral sites until the semi-finals, giving longshots another occasional advantage if they can draw a tougher team at home.) It's true that the bigger teams don't even enter into the tourney until the later rounds but no seeding ensures that a lesser team can often luck its way through the draw into a final -- as Cardiff City did last year and Millwall did several seasons ago. The problem, of course, is that these teams often are non-competitive in the final, but it does keep the myth alive.

Short of that, we're going to continue to have boring NCAA tournaments until the later rounds. So it goes.