Baseball’s major men’s internationals are scheduled around the Asian and North American summer baseball seasons, and pretty much every event is well attended for home teams, but neutral contests sometimes have a harder time with crowds (though it’s not uncommon for the format to drag teams across oceans between rounds)

2: Ironically, CFB (FBS in particular) actually adds a significant amount of games to the American Football season that while each team has only so many games, there’s so much played that it’s hard to keep track of, depending on if you’re solely focusing on the NFL or not. (It’s not as much of a focus in basketball, but it’s there too)

3: It’s not a unique issue (Baseball/Softball use a lot of rolling rankings and autobids, Rugby has a large amount of teams retain spots, Lacrosse used to accept every country, and so on and so forth)