Tourney expansion talk isn’t going away

NCAA would have to delicately thread needle if more teams added.

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, NIL 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.

NC State earned the ACC’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 now are 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 (Keatts, who was on the hot seat, received a contractually mandated two-year extension for earning an NCAA bid). It also has done little to alter Keatts’ view about whether the tourney 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 — while acknowledging bowls are not the purview of the NCAA nor are the vast majority of bowl teams playing for a national title — forcing 81% of the 362 Division I basketball schools to watch March Madness on TV might seem outdated and unnecessarily punitive.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.

More teams, more problems?

An NCAA committee has discussed all of this at length in the wake of the organization’s transformation committee suggesting 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 68-school bracket that’s been in place 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 during the first weekend in April. And beginning the tournament earlier to accommodate expansion would cause a ripple effect that would force the regular season to start even earlier.

The NCAA’s $8.8 billion TV contract runs through 2032 and won’t 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 basically would stay the same whether the field expands or not.

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

Each team that reaches the NCAA Tournament currently receives the same amount of revenue (called a “unit” in NCAA parlance) for making the tournament. But the longer a school’s tournament run, the more units the school’s conference receives. (Units increase only through the regional final.)

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

What could shift with an expansion of the field 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.

But that would be a setup that potentially could further exacerbate the already-widening fiscal gap between super-sized conferences like the Big Ten and SEC and everyone else.

‘We’re what make this tournament’

The most memorable moments from the opening weekend weren’t the chalky blowouts, but 13th-seeded Yale’s stunner over fourth-seeded Auburn and No. 14 Oakland taking down the bluest of blue bloods in an electrifying upset of third-seeded Kentucky.

Oakland coach Greg Kampe, who will begin his 41st season with the Golden Grizzlies next fall, is actually against expansion even though Oakland competes in the Horizon League, which hasn’t received multiple NCAA bids since 2009. Still, he understands the landscape is changing. Kampe is hopeful amid all this change that the powers that be won’t forget what — or, more importantly, who — brings the madness to March.

“We’re what make this tournament,” Kampe said, “the little guy.”

Zoom out, though, and bigger has always seemed to be better for the NCAAs. What started as an eight-team curiosity in Philadelphia, San Francisco and Chicago in 1939 has mushroomed to a 68-team behemoth spread across the country that stakes its claim to an entire month on the sports calendar.

TV ratings for the opening two rounds to the 2024 edition were the highest in five years. The presence of programs like North Carolina, Duke and defending national champion UConn in the Sweet 16 likely means interest figures only to spike as the tournament barrels toward the Final Four.

But no matter how big the tournament gets, there always will be some schools left on the outside looking in.

Pitt forward Blake Hinson would know. Six days after calling the current tourney size “perfect,” Hinson and the Panthers — who finished fourth in the ACC during the regular season — saw their bubble burst when the Wolfpack ran off with the ACC tourney title.

“You know, some people get missed,” Hinson said before the 22-win Panthers were left out. “And that’s part of it.”

SUSAN WALSH/AP North Carolina State coach Kevin Keatts and his team earned an automatic NCAA bid by winning the ACC Tourney. Keatts is one of many who want to see more at-large bids handed out.