The first two days of the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament are the two best days of the sports year, with 32 games and a smorgasbord of unlikely heroes, Cinderella stories, and buzzer beaters.

And last night’s great Duke-Belmont game served as a reminder that the best part of all is seeing a scrappy team from a small conference take on one of the powers of the college basketball world. When those “mid-majors” win, they usually do so by combining sound fundamentals with good shooting, overcoming significant disadvantages in size and athleticism. It’s the classic David versus Goliath story, and it’s part of what makes March Madness great.

But the first round of this year’s tournament, which featured 16 games yesterday and 16 more today, deprives fans of seeing many of those contests. This year, the NCAA tournament selection committee paired too many mid-majors against each other, resulting in several David versus David match-ups to go along with a lot of Goliath versus Goliath games.

The first-round games in this year’s tournament include UNLV against Kent State yesterday and include Butler against South Alabama, Drake against Western Kentucky, and Davidson against Gonzaga today. Those four games feature eight schools from outside the power conferences of college sports. And they represent four missed opportunities to make the first two days of the tournament more interesting.

Although the members of the selection committee claim they don’t take such things into consideration when putting the brackets together, the circumstantial evidence suggests that the committee likes to see mid-majors play mid-majors and power conference teams play power conference teams in the first round. For instance, after choosing Gonzaga and West Virginia as no. 7 seeds and Davidson and Arizona as no. 10 seeds, the selection committee picked Gonzaga and Davidson, the two mid-majors, to play against each other and the two larger schools to play against each other. It would have been just as easy — and more fun for the fans — if it had instead paired Davidson against West Virginia and Gonzaga against Arizona. Similarly, mid-majors Drake and Western Kentucky could have been matched up against majors Clemson and Villanova, instead of pitted against each other.

Officially, the NCAA doesn’t acknowledge any difference between the mid-majors and the major conferences. In fact, not everyone can agree on what constitutes a mid-major. The term is generally used to describe teams outside the Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-10, Atlantic Coast, and Southeastern conferences, although a few other programs, including the Memphis Tigers of Conference USA, are generally recognized as majors, even if their conferences are not.

Fans of mid-major programs often complain that the selection committee wants the mid-majors to cannibalize each other and be eliminated from the tournament quickly to make room for the big schools. Alternatively, fans of the power conferences sometimes suggest the opposite — that the selection committee wants to ensure that some mid-majors will advance to the second round of the tournament, and the only way to guarantee that is to have them play each other in the first.

It wouldn’t be possible in all situations to pair a mid-major team with a power conference team — there are only so many ways to slot 64 teams into one single-elimination playoff — but reducing the number of first-round games in which mid-majors square off against each other would be easy. There’s no guarantee that fewer match-ups of mid-major versus mid-major would result in better basketball. But the one game featuring two mid-majors yesterday was an ugly one. No. 8 seed UNLV (which plays in the Mountain West Conference) jumped out to a huge lead against no. 9 seed Kent State (which plays in the Mid-American Conference) and then coasted through a dull second half to a 71–58 victory. CBS switched most viewers to more competitive games, but the few fans who did watch must have wished they could see how UNLV would fare against a school from one of the power conferences. Matching UNLV against any of the other no. 9 seeds — Arkansas (SEC), Oregon (Pac-10), or Texas A&M (Big 12) — would have been more interesting.

Ultimately, pairing mid-majors against each other makes March Madness less fun for the fans. The game everyone remembers from last year’s first round was when No. 11 seed Virginia Commonwealth of the Colonial Athletic Association upset mighty Duke, and the game everyone will remember from yesterday is Duke-Belmont. The NCAA should give the Virginia Commonwealths and the Belmonts of the college basketball world more chances to beat the Dukes.

Mr. Smith covers college basketball for AOLFanHouse.com.