Should NCAA tourney expand to 72 teams?

? DESTIN, Fla. – The more the merrier

When it comes to the NCAA Tournament, Tennessee coach Rick Barnes and Vanderbilt coach Bryce Drew say yes.

“I think the more games the better,” Drew said Wednesday at the SEC meetings. “I think there’s so many good teams out there. You see it every year with certain teams that win and advance. If you add more teams, you’re just going to see more upsets.”

The dialogue comes in the wake of the ACC’s proposal to increase the NCAA Tournament field from 68 to 72 teams.

Drew said he’d like to see even more than 72 teams in the Big Dance.

The tournament expanded from 65 to 68 teams in 2011. That created a “First Four” – four play-in games to get into the field of 64. Expanding to 72 teams would add four more at-large bids and essentially create a “First Eight.”

The NCAA Tournament launched in 1939 with eight teams before expanding the field to 16, 22, 25, 32, 40, 48, 52, 53, 64, 65 and 68.

“I don’t think at any point in time when we’ve expanded has it ever hurt the tournament,” Barnes said. “It’s only made it better. My gut feeling is, it’s not going to hurt us in any way, shape or form. I think it would probably, somewhere along the line, be good.”

Barnes pointed to the parity in college basketball as a reason for tournament expansion.

The tournament has included at least one team seeded seventh or higher in the Final Four in each of the last six seasons.

“There is real parity, whether we want to admit it or not,” Barnes said. “Allowing some more teams to get into it, I would be all for that.”

Kentucky coach John Calipari is for tournament expansion, too – but with a caveat. He’d like to see a structure in which the additional four at-large bids would go to midmajor programs.

Last year, just three of the 36 atlarge bids went to teams not in the Power 5 conferences or the Big East or American Athletic Conference.

“I coached at UMass and Memphis, so if you’re saying, ‘Get more Power 5 teams in,’ then no, don’t do it,” Calipari said. “But if you’re doing it and you say that you’re going to do it for the midmajors or lower schools or schools that don’t have a chance, tell me how you’re going to guarantee them. Don’t tell me you’re going to do it and then all of a sudden we turn around and you have four new positions and three of them were from the Power 5.”