On the final Saturday of February, which brought us perilously close to March, the college basketball teams from Utah, Villanova, Texas A&M, Iowa, Drake, Virginia Tech, Butler, Cincinnati and Mississippi all were defeated, by an average margin of 17 points. The drive to reach the NCAA Tournament inspired not a single one toward excellence.
To be fair, that does not comprise the entire population of the March Madness “bubble”, but it is telling that just about the only teams in that neighborhood to win over the weekend were facing others in the same circumstance. There are no ties in basketball, so someone laboring to reach the NCAA field had to get the W.
If certain (really powerful) college athletics administrators had their way, though, they’d all be in.
Every last one of them.
Emphasizing the word “last”.
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Since the field was grown to 64 teams in the 1984-85 season, which was not long after the whole of the event became available on television nationally, the NCAA Tournament has grown well beyond what would seem to be the established boundaries of the sport for which it crowns a champion. The audience for the men’s college basketball regular season widely is underestimated – remember, there are more events contested and televised in this sport than any other in the U.S. – but the ratings demonstrate the 67 games of March Madness draw in millions who pay minimal attention from November through February.
Who would mess with such a wildly successful television program? It would be like having “The Sopranos” break out into a “Guys and Dolls”-style song-and-dance number every time someone was due to be whacked.
And who would want to dilute the regular season, already dismissed out of hand by many platformed national voices who refer to college basketball as a one-month sport?
Well, these guys.
“I think there’s ways for us to think about creating access points that bring more people into the game, which I always think can be healthy if done the right way.” – SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, October 2022.
"More access, more opportunity for more young men and women. There's a lot of positives to that." – ACC commissioner Jim Phillips, October 2022.
“I certainly think there’s an opportunity there to do more – find a way to bring more teams into the tournament.” – NCAA president Charlie Baker to ESPN, February 2024.
This isn’t really about access, not in the strictest sense. As ESPN analyst Jay Bilas points out, every team in college basketball that’s in a conference – which is all but one of the current eligible 351 – has access to the tournament by winning its league tournament. That’s how all of the 32 automatic bids are awarded.
This is about access for the most powerful conferences. There is concern among figures inside those leagues that their impending expansion will make it more difficult to achieve the traditional standards for March Madness qualification. The members of the selection committee, though, who would be the body that initially would approve any change to the tournament format, already have discussed that a tournament team might look different on paper in 2025 than before.
It’s not like these leagues are starving for inclusion. Over the previous five tournaments, the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, ACC, Pac-12 and Big East consumed an average of 30.4 of the available 36 at-large bids, or 84.4 percent. In the current Bracket Matrix consensus of online NCAA Tournament projections, 80.5 percent would go to major conference teams. And it would be 83 percent if at-large candidate Florida Atlantic wins the American tournament. That's as it should be; most of the best players, coaches and teams are in the power conferences.
The logical approach would be to go through one or two tournaments and see if inclusion really becomes a problem for members of 16- or 18-team power conferences.
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The NCAA Tournament grew consistently over time, from eight teams when introduced in 1939 to the current 68, which the field reached beginning in 2011. And the truth is expansion by another four teams, to a 72-team field, would not damage the event in the least. Viewers would be free to ignore the two games that would be added to accommodate the extra teams, as so many do the current First Four, and tune in Thursday just past noon when the 64-team portion of the event launches.
What such an expansion would damage, though, is the regular season. College basketball already fights the tail end of the the college football season, the heart of the NFL playoffs and the NBA regular season for the oxygen available on the sports landscape.
There are lots of college football-firsters so loathe to share any attention with college basketball they’ll argue college hoops should push the start of the season into January, end the season in late April or May and abandon the one month the sport has come to own. There are hundreds of articles or radio discussions concocted each year to “catch up” fans on college basketball now that the Super Bowl is over.
Removing a large portion of the suspense regarding which teams might make the field would do nothing to elevate the sport’s profile. Instead, it would make that Texas A&M-Ole Miss game in mid-January mean that much less, because both probably would get into March Madness, anyway.
An expansion to 96 teams, which was essentially the recommendation presented by the NCAA’s Division I transformation committee in January 2023, would destroy both the regular season and March. There would be almost no incentive to achieve during the regular season. How do we know? Florida State, Georgia and LSU – all currently 15-13 – likely would be selected for a 96-team tournament.
It would likely mean the 32 top teams in the event getting a first-round bye while the other 64 play for the right to oppose those teams in the second round. Which means the magic we saw when UMBC upset Virginia or Fairleigh Dickinson defeated Purdue – the only No. 16 seeds ever to defeat No. 1 seeds in 38 years – would not be possible again. The next FDU still would be at the outer edge of the field, now a No. 24 seed, and matched against someone such as No. 9 seed Nebraska.
There is no guarantee, as well, that any manipulation of the field would retain the automatic bids for all 32 conference champions.
“If the tournament loses that feel of the small schools making a run and having the upsets and that, I just think you lose what’s special to college basketball,” former FDU coach Tobin Anderson, now at Iona, told The Sporting News. “Let’s be honest: We become the biggest thing in the world for about two weeks to three weeks.”
The last time there was a threat of expansion, in 2010, it was driven more by television than internal demand. There was reluctance on the part of CBS to continue broadcasting the event it had featured for decades because the economics of the broadcast business had not yet changed to valuing live sports at the level they are now.
The NCAA was compelled by membership to negotiate a contract that would continue producing annual revenue at or above the same level that had been in place; the figure then was about $700 million annually. NCAA sources told TSN then that ESPN had made expansion to 96 games – more games meant more opportunity to recover that investment-- but the entry of Turner Sports into a partnership with CBS allowed the tournament to continue with only a minor expansion, to 68 teams.
That’s where it’s been since, and its popularity with viewers now stands out as one of the most reliable sports properties for generating audience, behind only the NFL and the still-brief College Football Playoff. Next year, the NCAA will receive $1.1 billion from its broadcast partners for the three-week tournament. It might be worth even more, but former NCAA president Mark Emmert was in charge in 2016 as the organization extended the contract, originally set to expire this season, through 2032.
A dramatic expansion of the tournament field could be met with pushback from its television partners because of the possibility that dilution of the product would diminish its popularity.
So many of the elements that drive the current format’s popularity would be damaged by a significant expansion: the romance of a “Cinderella” such as FDU taking on one of the nation’s most powerful programs; the ability to fit the entire tournament bracket on an 8½-by-11 sheet of paper, the rush of the three-weekend format. The casuals that make up a significant portion of those millions that tune in are going to start to fill out an unruly 95-game bracket (what is a 13-19 game?) and say, 'yeah, no thanks.'
There’s a reason the NCAA Tournament underwent an expansion every 4.5 years for the first 45 years of the tournament’s existence but executed only two in the 39 years since. Because, by genius or fortune, they discovered a formula that works. Perfectly.
In the first six months of 2023, the 22 most-watched sporting events were NFL games. No. 23 was the College Football Playoff final. The 24th was the NCAA championship game between Tristen Newton, Donovan Clingan and the UConn Huskies and San Diego State featuring Jaedon Ledee and Lamont Butler. The audience for the basketball championship was smaller than that for college football's biggest game by only 40,000.
Of the top 50 events, 25 were NFL games. A dozen were NBA Playoff games. Eight were contests from the 2023 NCAA Tournament, even though that edition featured fewer of the sport’s big brands making deep runs than any in recent memory.
“We all agree it’s the greatest college athletic event,” Penn State coach Mike Rhoades told The Sporting News. “So we can’t lose sight of that, without a doubt. There’s got to be give-and-take on everybody’s part to not lose that incredible March Madness. So I hope we don’t. Bigger and badder and all that stuff isn’t always better if we don’t make the right decisions.
“One thing about March Madness … is so many people, even outside of basketball, become basketball fans. Let’s not lose that.
“Now, I understand the big business side of things – or I’m understanding it more and more. But I also think doing the right thing is the right thing.”
