Everybody knows you don’t let freshmen go to the Prom.

The NCAA can be roundly criticized for structuring many aspects of college sports poorly. One of the things it does right is running a men’s basketball championship every March.

Sixty-five teams compete for the right to be the national champion in a show of the best amateur basketball players in the country. And it is simple to follow: If teams win, they advance. If they lose, they go home. No series. No double elimination. No mess.

In fact, it is one of the few things done well among any sport that is connected to big money TV coverage.

And now the NCAA is proposing to screw it all up. The organization — founded in 1906 to protect student-athletes — wants to make more money from the tournament of athletes who don’t get one thin dime. The proposal is to expand the tournament to 96 teams, which would allow the NCAA to solicit additional dollars from TV coverage.

More games only will keep the students out of the classroom longer, and more games will decrease the relevance of conference tournaments.

A USA Today poll says 80 percent of fans are against having 96 teams. Of course, in sports, it seems the fans lose out.

The NCAA can’t even give the fans a playoff system for college football, yet it is eager to blow the men’s basketball tournament way out of proportion.

A 96-team tournament will be like one of those everybody-get-a-ribbon basketball jamborees back in elementary school. Not every team should get to go to the Big Dance. That’s what the National Invitation Tournament is for. Let the bubble teams go there.

We hope the NCAA listens to the fans. Don’t fix what isn’t broken. More teams will decrease the value of being in the tourney and result in fewer viewers. The format of 10 days over three weeks is hard enough to watch as it is.

Moreover, in the new format, people would have fewer days to fill out those brackets. In fact, we’d like to get rid of play-in games, and have a field of 64.

But if the 96-team plan doesn’t happen next season, it seems the NCAA would go toward a 68-team tournament.

Say, is there anything else on?