NCAA March madness expanding to ...

Expansion, expansion, expansion?

NCAA tournament wants to expand?the rich will get richer?is this a good thing for college basketball?

The NCAA just voted to expand their 65-team tournament to 68, after speculation and all the talk centered around an expansion from 65 to a whopping 96 teams. The expansion to 96 teams would essentially combine the NIT and NCAA tournaments into one, with 32 play-in games.

Forgetting the obvious implication that the move is motivated by money, there are plenty of positives to take away from expanding the tournament. Is any type of expansion good for the game? I tend to think strongly that some sort of expansion was needed to make the tournament more inclusive of programs deserving to be there. If the tournament committee is serious about getting the 64 best teams in the tournament, you can?t possibly let teams like Lehigh and Arkansas-Pine Bluff, while leaving out programs like UConn, Illinois and my personal favorite, Virginia Tech.

The problem is that you cannot cut out teams from bad conferences completely. They did, after all, win their conference and earn their right to be there. However, what you can do is make those programs play each other and whittle down the number of teams who are very unlikely to win any game in March. That is what expansion does for this tournament. Starting next year, the bottom eight teams in the tournament will play each other in play-in games for the right to be the 16-seeds in all four regions.

What this means is that four teams who won their conference tournaments will not make the final field of 64. Four programs that, under the old 65-team format, would all be 16 seeds. 16 seeds currently have a win-loss record of 0-for-lifetime. So the chances of those teams bowing out early in the tournament were pretty close to 100% anyway.
So who fills the void of the programs who will be out after the play-in games? That honor will go to the teams who would normally be ?on the bubble? in the 65-team format. They will not be 16, 15 or 14 seeds though. The teams that are on the bubble in most years are good enough to be anywhere from a 12 seed to a 9 seed, which is where you will likely see them slotted. This move will make for more competitive games from top to bottom.

Can you imagine if Robert Morris (who nearly knocked off Villanova in the first round) were a 16 seed and playing Syracuse or Duke? That game would be much more exciting. How about if Ohio were a 15 seed? They beat 3rd-seeded Georgetown, so it isn?t out of the realm of possibility that they would beat a 2nd-seeded Villanova. Maybe the best case is that of Murray State. Murray State (13 seed) defeated 4th-seeded Vanderbilt and were a late turnover away from beating eventual National Runner-Up and Cinderella incarnate, Butler. Murray State matches up well with any 3 seed in the tournament.

I would have liked for the NCAA to have taken an even bigger step with expansion. I wasn?t a big fan of expanding to the absurd 96-team tournament that was proposed a month ago, but I did like the idea of expanding to 72 teams. Eventually, I feel that the NCAA will expand to 72 teams, especially if the 3-team expansion goes well.

If the NCAA expands to 72, this means 8 programs will be out after the play-in games. Using this year?s tournament as a model, if you were to take away the 8 worst teams in the tournament, you would be left with a solid field. The bottom 4 teams would then be:

Robert Morris (lost to Villanova by 3)
Sam Houston State (lost to final 4 participant, Baylor by 9)
Ohio (beat Georgetown by 14)
Montana (lost to New Mexico by 5)

Those 4 teams would be 16 seeds! All of a sudden the tournament field becomes really competitive and the 1 seeds can no longer sleep-walk through the first round. But, the NCAA chose to expand to 68. It?s a good step, and more should be on the way, but until then, then tournament will have significant improvement.

So who wins with this arrangement? The power conferences will obviously win, with a chance to gain 1 or 2 more bids into the tournament. The fans win with more competitive games. The programs win with a better chance to get into the tournament and gain revenue. Las Vegas wins, because bets will become more competitive without the ?gimmes? in the first round. CBS wins with 4 more games to broadcast (lots of commercial money to be had).

Who loses out on this arrangement? The mid-majors. Teams from the smallest conferences will lose as they will be out of the tournament before it truly begins. Dreams of playing on Thursday and Friday of the NCAA opening round will be dashed in Dayton, Ohio, and they?ll watch the tournament on television, just like everyone else. Recruiting will suffer for those programs (especially if the power conferences expand, like it seems they will). If you expanded to 72 and had 8 nationally televised games, it would be harder to ignore than 4 games between 8 sub-par programs.

Will expansion work? Only time will tell, but the groundwork has been laid for the
tournament to be more competitive and more inclusive, which is exactly what college basketball needed.