Expanding tournament field could be a tricky proposition
NCAA must balance more teams against beauty of event
Kevin Keatts and North Carolina State reached the NCAA Tournament the old-fashioned way.
The way that existed before the bubble. Before bracketology. Before NET rankings, Kenpom, the transfer portal, name, image and likeness and all the rest. Before the tournament field grew (and grew some more), when the only way to punch your ticket into March Madness was by winning your conference tournament.
N.C. State earned the Atlantic Coast Conference’s automatic bid by ripping off five victories in five days to capture the conference tournament title. The 11th-seeded Wolfpack pushed their postseason winning streak to seven and are now in the Sweet 16 for the first time in nearly a decade.
It’s been a thrilling if exhausting ride, the kind of run that saves jobs. It has also done little to alter Keatts’ view about whether the tournament should expand beyond its current 68-team format:
In an era where more than half the 133 Division I football programs qualify for a bowl game (while acknoledging this is not the purview of the NCAA), forcing 80 percent of the 350-plus Division I basketball schools to watch March Madness from their dorms seems outdated and unnecessarily punitive.
“We talk about the student-athlete experience, and the only thing that really, in my opinion, that has not changed is expanding the tournament,” Keatts said. “And I don’t have a number. I don’t know what that should be. But I do think we should give more schools opportunities to be able to get in the tournament.”
Keatts is hardly alone. The chorus for expansion is growing ever louder.
The NCAA committee has discussed all of this at length in the wake of the organization’s transformation committee suggesting that Ncaa-sanctioned
championships in larger sports be open to a quarter of the teams participating in it.
In Division I men’s basketball, that breaks down to around an 88-team field, which would make for an unwieldy option to the (nearly) perfect 68-school bracket that’s been an office pool staple the morning after Selection Sunday since 2011.
Going that large seems unlikely. CBS and Warner Brothers Discovery have no interest in moving the Final Four past its current end day the first weekend in April. And beginning the tournament earlier to accommodate massive expansion would cause a ripple effect that would force the regular season to start even earlier at a time when attention is focused squarely on football in most places.
While Big East Commissioner Val Ackerman believes most of her colleagues are more open to a “modest” bump to 72 or 76 teams, the real sticking point is over money and access.
The NCAA’S $8.8 billion TV contract runs through 2032 and will not change regardless of the field size. Though adding more games would provide a small boost through ticket sales and merchandise, the reality is the pool of money the NCAA uses to pay out conferences and member schools would essentially stay the same whether the field expands or not.
Atlantic 10 Commissioner Bernadette Mcglade, who spent 10 years on the men’s tournament selection committee, has become a strong advocate for expansion if it’s done the right way. That means not predicating expansion on the idea that the extra 4-8 at-large bids automatically go to mid-tier schools from a power conference.
“I do think the (NCAA) has to keep the (big conferences’) feet to the fire to maintain some semblance of fairness for the student-athletes,” she said. “They can’t just keep taking more and more and more.”
And therein lies an issue harder to define: Who and what is March Madness designed for?