Enjoy the tournament while you can
LEXINGTON, Ky. — St. John’s isn’t happy. Providence isn’t happy. Pittsburgh isn’t happy. Wake Forest isn’t happy. Indiana State isn’t happy. Oklahoma isn’t happy. Seton Hall isn’t happy. It hurts to be left out.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons for various people and programs to be upset with the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Selection Committee over some of their head-scratching decisions and glaring omissions from this year’s field.
There are not enough of those omissions to expand the tournament beyond the current 68-team format, however.
But you watch, that’s exactly what the powers that be are working to accomplish. It’s the way of corporate America these days. It’s considered boardroom brilliance to take a good thing and change it for the sake of “making it better” or “improving it” while killing what the public loved about that particular thing in the first place.
According to reports, the NCAA is considering inflating the tournament field to as many as 80 or maybe even 96 teams, as soon as next season. The more the merrier goes the thinking. But instead of awarding those extra bids to deserving mid-majors in typically one-bid leagues, you can bet those extra slots will be gift-wrapped for the greedy mega-conferences that hold all the power.
Greg Sankey is in the front row for this. The SEC commissioner took heat last week — deservedly so — when in an interview with ESPN’s Pete Thamel, Sankey used UCLA’s run from the First Four to the Final Four in 2021 and Syracuse’s run from the First Four to the Sweet 16 in 2018 as reasons to include more power conference teams.
“That just tells you that the bandwidth inside the top 50 is highly competitive,” Sankey told Thamel. “We are giving away highly competitive opportunities for automatic qualifiers (from smaller leagues), and I think that pressure is going to rise as we have more competitive basketball leagues at the top end because of expansion.”
Spoken like a true corporate boss more interested in expanding his fiefdom than doing what’s good for the game. Expanding the field so the ninth-place team in the SEC or the 10th-place team in the Big Ten can have a spot on a bracket line is not what the tournament is all about. Or should be about.
March Madness should be about Fairleigh Dickinson upsetting No. 1 seed Purdue (2023); about Maryland-Baltimore County upsetting No. 1 seed Virginia (2018); about Lehigh upsetting No. 2 seed Duke (2012); about Saint Peter’s upsetting No. 2 seed Kentucky (2022), then advancing all the way to the Elite Eight.
The beauty of the NCAA Tournament when David has the chance to knock off Goliath and the stone lands. That’s what draws the casual fan who doesn’t follow the sport until March.
Big Ten sixth-place finisher Indiana playing SEC 10th-place finisher Ole Miss doesn’t have quite the same appeal.
By the way, Sankey conveniently left out that American Athletic Conference member Florida Atlantic made last season’s Final Four. Mountain West Conference member San Diego State made the national title game. None of the so-called power conference schools with their “highly competitive opportunities” could stop that from happening.
Also, are we just going to make college basketball’s regular season as meaningless as the NBA’s regular season? Are we eventually going to throw open the doors and send a Big Dance invitation to every team that knows how to dribble, as ex-Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim advocated for a few years back?
The whole expansion idea is a bad idea.
“Profoundly stupid,” said former Duke forward Jay Bilas, now ESPN’s lead college basketball color analyst, when asked about tournament expansion.
“It’s a treasure,” former Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski told Thamel. “It’s not something where you flippantly say, ‘Let’s go to 96 [teams].’ Everyone, just keep quiet and recognize the treasure we have.”
For the next three weeks, let’s enjoy the treasure we have while we still have it.
We’ve said this before, but it bears repeating.
Keep your hands off the NCAA Tournament.