Why play when we can poll?

Whattya mean they need 61 games to determine a national basketball champion?!

In football, it's one game, over and out, nice and not so neat, and let the arguments begin.

Who needs a playoff when there is a perfectly good poll system out there to create an instant championship game? This is madness. There's entirely too much excitement and fun going on out there.

Whoever's running this NCAA basketball tournament should talk to the people who run college football and get on the same page. Maybe the schizoids at the NCAA can talk to the schizoids of the NCAA and compare notes.

Someone call the BCS. Polls matchups would prevent all these silly upsets that come with tournament play. College basketball needs the drama and contention of the polls and bowls. Why settle this thing on the court, with all the hassles of dozens of games, when it could be settled quietly in some back room, like an election? Think of all the great arguments that fans

could be having over split national champions instead of watching actual games?!

The tournament just makes a mess out of things. Sheesh, George Mason didn't get a single vote in the final top 25 poll — a lot of "experts" said they didn't even belong in the tournament — and now they're going to the Final Four. It's a disaster — for the first time in 26 years, not a single No. 1 seed made it to the Final Four.

Think of all the wasted money, the wasted time, the wasted gasoline, the wasted oxygen, and the threat to the environment. Billy Packer and Dick Vitale expend enough hot air each March to cause global warming all by themselves. (Thankfully, Bill Walton is not in the lineup or both polar icecaps are gone by tomorrow.)

Consider the decline in work productivity caused by March Madness. According to a report by Challenger Gray and Christmas — the oldest outplacement consulting firm based in the U.S. — employees wasted some $890 million on the job last year doing all things related to the NCAA tournament (watching games, filling out office pools, thinking and talking about games, calling their bookies, checking scores, etc.). (Don't tell the boss, but did you know that 56 games can be seen online?)

What gives? Didn't the NCAA say the reason it couldn't have a football playoff is because it costs the student-athletes too much time in the classroom. Basketball players miss a lot more class time than football players, so why the double standard? Players who survive the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament might as well enroll in correspondence courses. Jim McMahon attended more class than these guys. It's just begging for a poll system.