RALEIGH, N.C. — It’s way too early to say the train has left the station, but it might be time to stop worrying about whether the powers that be are going to expand the NCAA basketball tournament and start worrying about how to minimize any damage when they do.
The NCAA’s transformation committee last week floated the idea that as much as 25 percent of teams should qualify for NCAA championships, which isn’t particularly controversial in some sports but in basketball means about 90 teams. On Wednesday, at the ACC’s annual basketball media event, commissioner Jim Phillips said that expansion of the basketball tournament specifically was worth “taking a look at.”
“I’m not saying we should do it. But the timing seems to be right, it does,” Phillips told The News & Observer. “With the new constitution, the new governing structure, what we do know we want the NCAA to handle is the oversight of championships. They do a good job there. They do. I know they’ve had some hiccups. But we should look at it. We need to.”
This started with sports other than basketball, where there’s more pressure to expand opportunities to compete for a national title, but it inevitably circles back to basketball, the NCAA’s largest and most profitable championship because the College Football Playoff is a separate entity.
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey talked over the summer about expanding the baseball tournament and taking away small conference automatic bids to the basketball tournament after Mississippi won the College World Series as the last team in (over N.C. State, among others) and Texas A&M was left out of the 68-team basketball field.
Phillips said he was against shrinking the number of automatic qualifiers, and that terrible idea, fortunately, hasn’t gained much traction. That would be the first step toward killing the golden basketball goose. But the idea of adding teams to NCAA championships seems to be gathering steam, even if it’s still just a topic for discussion at this point. Phillips said he has yet to even discuss it with the ACC’s athletic directors.
“Access to championships is something every student-athlete obviously desires,” Phillips said. “We have to look at it.”
But it’s impossible not to consider what it means for basketball, because the ramifications are more significant in basketball than any other sport — not just because of the money involved, but because if you expand the men’s tournament, you’re going to have to expand the women’s tournament, as well. After the gender-equity issues in 2021, an entirely self-inflicted NCAA wound, those tournaments are very much a package deal going forward.
This is all very vague at the moment, and expansion could be more easily accommodated in sports like baseball and soccer. But talk of expanding the basketball tournament is always bubbling along on a low simmer somewhere, and after a decade-plus of the 68-team status quo the 25 percent guideline could serve as a catalyst.
What that might look like is entirely unknown at this point. Expansion could take the form of adding more First Four games, at multiple sites, or it could add an entire weekend to the tournament as a 96-team field with byes for top seeds. That would require a complete restructuring of the college basketball calendar, since the Final Four is always going to be the weekend before the Masters, forever and ever, amen.
How CBS and Turner feel about this will have a lot to say about where this eventually goes, and there’s a big difference between the kind of incremental change that takes the tournament from 68 to 72 teams and the kind of massive change that would alter the fundamentals of the entire sport. But college football is going through all of that right now with the regular-season and year-round calendar changes that will come with CFP expansion, and the first time is always the hardest.
“Even though I’m probably a younger age as far as coaches go, I’m a historian,” Duke’s Jon Scheyer said. “You love the purity of what it was at 64 and then you go to 68. It’s been great. We have to be careful, of course, but we do need to be innovative and look at different ways we can improve the tournament. I’m open to it, but you don’t want to lose the purity of what March Madness stands for and the excitement it creates.”
And Wake Forest’s Steve Forbes has concerns, but also knows what it’s like to be on the wrong side of the bubble: “If you’d asked me this last year in March,” Forbes said. “I would have said expand that thing to 90.”
Then there are the less obvious questions: What if you put out a 96-team bracket that doesn’t easily fit on an 8 1/2-by-11 sheet of paper? The vast majority of pools may be conducted online these days, but being able to print off a bracket feels like an indispensable part of the experience.
Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. But expanding the tournament and then finding out people aren’t as interested in filling out a bracket — still, after all these years, the driving force behind college basketball dominating a month of the sports calendar — would be an expensive way to make that discovery.
