I distinctly remember when the notion hit me.



It happened during a first-round NCAA Tournament game between No. 2-seeded Tennessee and No. 15 Winthrop. The game was close from the tip. Tennessee led by two points at halftime and won, 63-61, on a jump shot by Chris Lofton with 0.4 seconds remaining. As I watched from inside the CBS studio, it struck me that if you didn’t know anything about these teams, you would have no idea there was supposed to be such a huge gap between them. Or any gap, really. When it was over, I went on air and described how the game reflected the state of college basketball. “The world is flat,” I said, borrowing the title from the best-selling book published the year before by The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman.



That was in 2006.



In the decade-plus since, the college hoops world has continued to flatten, so much so that not only is it hard to tell the difference between a No. 2 seed and a No. 15 (or a No. 1...