THE FRONT ROW with MARK NELKE: Everything else is expanding — what about state tournaments?

It happens every year in college basketball.

At least in the smaller conferences, where only one team is guaranteed a berth in the NCAA tournament.

A team rolls through league play, then gets upset in the conference tourney and doesn’t get selected for an at-large berth to the NCAAs.

Oh, the outrage!

“How does our East-Central Tech team, with its terrific record, not get into the dance, but Blue Blood U., with its .500 record, get in?” fans of the spurned team rail.

But if it’s one of the top-tier conferences, if the league champ gets bumped off during the conference tourney, that team still gets in with an at-large berth.

IN IDAHO high school sports, with the exception of football, which has at-large berths, you play your way into the state tournaments.

Win the right games in the postseason, and you get in. Lose them, and you’re out. Simple as that.

But with deserving teams getting bumped off in regionals in recent years and thus not qualifying for state, the cries have gone out on the internet to find ways to make sure those teams get to play at state.

Just in North Idaho, in two of the last three years, the No. 1 seed in the 5A Region 1 girls basketball tournament has been knocked off twice at regionals and stayed home from state.

It happened to Lake City two years ago, and Coeur d’Alene last week.

Coeur d’Alene’s baseball team suffered a similar fate a few years back.

And it’s happened in 4A Region 1 soccer a number of times, where the tournament is even more cutthroat. The top seed plays one game to go to state — win and you go to state, lose and your season is over. No second-place game to rebound at. No state play-in game. Done.

ONE OF the cries is to expand the state tournaments in basketball. They are all eight-team tournaments now; some have said expand them to 16.

That would be silly in Idaho. In 5A, there are only 20 schools; in 4A, 27; in 3A, 21 and in 2A, 27.

It MIGHT make sense in 1A Division I, which has 33, and 1A Division II, which has 36.

But usually there aren’t 16 state-worthy teams in those divisions either. I remember in one of the lower divisions in football a couple years ago, some teams opted out of the playoffs, rather than get clobbered.

(I've seen a few eight-team state tournaments that maybe didn't need to have that many teams, too.)

In football in Idaho, you can’t really do a regional tournament, with play-in games. So they have at-large berths, based on league finish, MaxPreps rankings or other criteria, depending on the classification.

And they expanded the state playoffs, to give more teams throughout the state a chance to get in. In 5A, North Idaho coaches led the push for that. Before, with berths allocated solely on how many teams were in your league, some leagues got a lot of berths to state — whether they deserved them or not.

Jim Winger, boys basketball coach and athletic director at Lake City, remembers the “old days” when there were just three teams in the 5A Inland Empire League (compared to four now), when only the league champ (or regional champ, depending on the sport) advanced to state.

“It does not mean that your No. 2 team isn't really good,’ Winger said, “but they have no chance to get there. Some years our No. 2 team is better than (No.) 5 or 6 out of Boise — and they have no shot.”

Hence, the expanded playoffs in football, from eight to 12 teams in 5A, and expanded to various numbers in the other divisions as well.

As far as state basketball is concerned, some have suggested giving the league champ the automatic berth to state, and playing the regional/district tournament for state seeding.

Others have suggested using MaxPreps rankings to determine the state qualifiers, and maybe doing away with the state-qualifying tournaments.

I don’t know about that one.

Seems like eight should be plenty in a smallish state like Idaho, but the trend seems to be to make tournaments bigger, not smaller.

SO IF we must expand, here's our suggestion.

Expand the tournaments to 12 teams, with eight automatic qualifiers — determined the current way — and four at-large berths. The top four teams that didn’t earn any of the eight automatic berths would be the four at-large teams.

That would usually get in the league champ that gets upset at regionals, as well as another team or two that was a good team in a tough league, but didn’t qualify for state because their league didn’t get as many berths.

Start the state tournaments on Wednesday, with four games in each classification — with seeds 5-12 playing single-elimination games, with the winners advancing to the usual eight-team bracket on Thursday.

The at-large teams would be seeded 9-12, regardless of where they were ranked by MaxPreps, which currently seeds the eight teams that qualify for state.

Some of the 5-8 seeds might cry foul, as it were, having to face perhaps the top team in the state in a loser-out game on Wednesday.

But no matter the format, somebody’s going to have an issue. Some folks complained about the old way the Idaho High School Activities Association bracketed the tournament — which on some occasions, pitted two of the top teams in the state against each other in the first round.

IN ANY EVENT, this is all just internet chatter for now — if a group of coaches or administrators wanted to bring such a proposal to the IHSAA, then the ball might get rolling toward change.

But until then, be prepared to win the games you’re supposed to — or else.

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 208-664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter @CdAPressSports.