The NCAA’s 65-team Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament is billed as “America’s Greatest Sporting Event.” Who, I wonder, came up with this?

Certainly not TV audiences, as the tournament has been steadily losing viewers for several years. This loss has been offset, to some degree, by internet viewers, most of whom follow the tournament from their office screens, though surveys have indicated that most office jocks tend to drop off and go back to work when their team is eliminated. Though it may be several years before we know if this new “narowcasting” will make up for advertising revenue lost in broadcasting, perhaps the slogan should be changed to “America’s Biggest Office Distraction.”

But we do have a pretty good idea who coined the phrase – the NCAA. What’s amazing is how unchallenged that declaration goes in the sports press. If, for instance, a 32-team tournament called itself “America’s Greatest Sporting Event,” would anyone swallow it? I don’t think so.

They certainly wouldn’t if it were a 16-team tournament because then it wouldn’t be much bigger than the postseasons of most professional sports leagues. But as anyone can plainly see year after year, any tournament that includes more than 16 teams is transparently bogus.

For one thing, nearly half the participants are teams that have earned automatic bids by winning their conference tournaments, the slickest method of revenue padding since college teams began putting numbers on the back of jerseys and selling fans programs so they could identify the players. For decades, there was a perfectly good method of selecting conference champions: It was called the regular season.

Now, as an excuse to sell tickets and broadcasting rights for more games, unnecessary conference playoffs have been added, the sole practical purpose of which, besides generating more revenue, is to give inferior teams a chance to win something in one game that they did not earn over the course of the season.

All of this is irrelevant, of course, when it comes to determining the nat1tional champion. Just about everyone can name the three or four or five teams who will come out on top. It shouldn’t be necessary to cite these figures again, but unfortunately, they seem to be forgotten at tournament time: No. 1 seeds have a perfect 80-0 record in the first round since the tournament went to 64 teams in 1985; they’re 52-0 over the last 13 years. No. 2 seeds have gone 49-3 over the last 13 years. Let’s stop and add it up: That’s 101-3 for Ones and Twos against 16s and 15s over the past decade.

There are an awful lot of well meaning people who seem to think that “3-101” justifies the tournament as it is. For instance, my friend and colleague King Kaufman wrote yesterday inSalon.com, “The tournament is known for its buzzer beaters and crazy upsets – who can forget the most recent jaw-dropper, 15-seed Hampton beating no. 2 Iowa State in 2001?”

Well, yes, we do remember it, just as we will always remember the Red Sox winning the World Series last year. You tend to remember anything that’s a once-in-a-thousand (or, in this case, a 3 out of 104) proposition. But no one should think that those nos. 15 and 16 are needed in order to determine the best college basketball team in the country.

And if the records of the top two seeds don’t convince you, extend it through the third and fourth seeds: Ones through fours have compiled a 189-19 record in the opening round over the last 10 tournaments. That’s a 91% win rate. No.1 seeds have won nine of the last 13 championships,no.2 seeds have won 2, and one no. 3 and one no. 4 seed account for the other two titles.

No one thinks there is a legitimate reason for 65 teams being included in a national basketball tournament. But when the Final Four comes around with its inevitable mix-match from the top few college basketball superpowers, no one wants to remember the humiliation of low-seeded teams – everyone agrees to forget the false optimism of a week or so before when some 13th-seeded team squeaked by in the first round.

More than 20 years ago, the NCAA lost big-time college football for a while when a group of major powers formed the College Football Association and kicked the NCAA out of contract bargaining. The NCAA men’s tournament is the reason this could never happen in basketball. In college basketball, there are too many major powers, and each of them needs a schedule full of patsies to fill out an entire season.

The NCAA controls the major powers by controlling the have-nots and wannabes. This almost sounds Robin Hoodish: taking from the very, very rich and giving to the moderately rich. In fact, this is almost exactly what it would be like if Robin Hood had the rights to negotiate TV contracts and sell sweaters, athletic gear, and posters.

As near as I can see, there are only two entities that benefit from “America’s Greatest Sporting Event” – the athletic departments, who receive a fat check for going along with this sham, and the NCAA itself, which keeps its power by doling out the cash to a wide selection of teams that otherwise would see little television money.

Yet even as I write this, I know that’s not entirely true. There is much to be said for a tournament that puts hundreds of boys on a stage they would never otherwise be on and will never have the opportunity to visit again. Most kids on the lower-seeded teams have no chance at an NBA career; they’re there for the scholarship and the chance to play college ball on the purest level that’s possible in a time of near total corruption.

The NCAA tournament provides that opportunity to kids playing for the Farleigh-Dickinsons and Oaklands and Delaware States. But most of them must know they have no chance to win the big one, and, essentially, they have been set up to lose, to be mere opponents. The most inspiring moments in the entire tournament occur when, for a while at least, the boys on these teams are able to maintain the illusion that they’re not there just to fill out the card. But what does it say about the mercenary hearts of those who set up this tournament that they continue to send such boys out there year after year to inevitable slaughter?

Newspaper editorialists spend 11 months out of the year lambasting the NCAA for being arbitrary, dictatorial, and brutal. Then they spend the other month, March, acting as the NCAA’s partner. It’s almost as if the Mafia were hammered in the press all year, then given two weeks of newspaper, television, and radio time to advertise a bake sale.