Big Dance expansion hopes walking line of March thrills

Kevin Keatts and North Carolina State reached the NCAA Tournament the oldfashioned 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 ACC’s automatic bid by ripping off five victories in five days to capture the conference tournament title. The 11 seed pushed its postseason winning streak to seven and is 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 acknowledging this is not the purview of the NCAA), forcing 80% of the 350-plus Division I basketball schools to watch March Madness from their dorms seems outdated and unnecessarily punitive.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 after its transformation committee suggesting that 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 88 team, an unwieldy option to the (nearly) perfect 68-school bracket in effect 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 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.

What could change, however, is how that money would be divided up if the tournament broadens.

Every team that reaches the NCAA Tournament receives the same amount of revenue (a “unit” in NCAA parlance). The longer a tournament run — through the regional final anyway — the more units the school’s conference receives.

For leagues that typically garner one or two bids, the windfall can make a serious impact. Loyola Chicago’s memorable run to the Final Four in 2018 gave the Missouri Valley Conference a significant boost.

What could shift if the field expands is how those units are allotted. One option could be to weigh the units, meaning having them grow exponentially through each round, thereby decreasing the value of simply making the field.

It’s a setup that could further exacerbate the already widening fiscal gap between super-sized conferences like the Big Ten and SEC and everyone else.

Ackerman stressed “none of us would like to see our unit value diminish,” and that the Big East — which had three teams advance to the Sweet 16 — would have a “point of view if it was going to be undercut in any way.”

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 for mid-tier schools from power conferences.