The Division I men’s basketball committee will convene in Savannah, Georgia, this week for its annual summer summit. There are many items on the agenda, but only one of them is of pivotal significance and interest to the American sports public.
NCAA Tournament expansion.
Will the selection committee opt to keep the most pristine postseason event in American sports in its current form, at the widely desired number of 68 teams? Or will it choose to dilute, downgrade and cheapen its men’s and women’s basketball tournaments by inflating them to 72 or, even worse, bloating to the peculiar number of 76? (Whatever decision happens with the men’s tournament, the same fate will accompany the women’s.)
Almost a year ago to the day I wrote a column laying out why expansion was not only unnecessary, it was largely unwanted. My opinion — one shared by millions of sports fans, by any objective scan of the environment — remains unchanged.
After more than three years of anxiety around the college sports industry, the wait is days from being over. We will find out the future of March Madness by week’s end.
Before the committee digs in and makes a decision, it’s now time to debunk the go-to talking point for expansion lobbyists. A common argument in support of widening the tourney falls back on the faulty logic of Division I being much smaller (by nearly 100 schools) when it expanded to 64 teams in 1985. “There were much fewer teams competing to make it in the NCAA Tournament back then! This is about access!” the misguided claim goes.
The reasoning is flawed for a few reasons, the biggest being it ignores the very nature of the tournament’s assembly. The long-lasting appeal with the most significant expansion decision in ’85 was primarily due to the perfect configuration of a six-round, 64-team grid. There is no beating the symmetrical nirvana that is a 64-school basketball championship. The tournament grew and grew and grew until it hits paradisal shape, and then college sports administrators couldn’t leave well enough alone. Every iteration before 1985 and every change since has produced a less glamorous product.
It’s why, even though we’re nearly a quarter-century removed from the last time the NCAA held a 64-team men’s tournament, most sports fans still regard the true start of March Madness to strike shortly after noon ET on that mid-March Thursday. For an overwhelming majority of sports fans, that’s when the tournament starts in earnest. It’s why March Madness pools have bracket deadlines up until 11:59 a.m ET instead of the Tuesday evening before the First Four tips.
Division I could have been 120 or 920 schools deep when it went to a 64-team concept in 1985, because 64 has always been the quintessential format. That’s always been the flawless model for a national basketball tournament, regardless of how big the pool of schools competing for those bids was. From 1985 through 2000, that’s what we had: the perfect tournament. Sixty-four teams, as the gods intended. In 2000, the Mountain West was birthed from the rib of the old WAC, prompting the awkward capitulation for a 65th team and one play-in game starting in 2001. That enabled the committee to vote for a 68-team tournament beginning in 2011, after serious talk of going to 96 in 2010 was met with vociferous pushback by the media and the public.
Now, power-conference commissioners, fidgety athletic directors and insecure coaches are trying to squeeze a few more teams into the field for the sake of “access.”
But access remains largely the same. Here’s the data those in favor of eroding the NCAA Tournament aren’t telling you.
Expansion has never been been about ‘access’
Forty years ago, 64 out of 282 teams played in the NCAA Tournament. That’s 22.7%. Last season, Division I had 364 teams, with 68 invitations, equating to 18.7%. Every team responsible for the four-point percentage gap over 40 years is a mid- or low-major program. These schools aren’t taking away bids from the conferences pushing expansion (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC).
Consider: There have been 91 Division I teams added since 1984-85 (with six of those having defected out of D-I since). Those schools have a total of 168 NCAA tournament bids. Out of 168 bids, how many took up an at-large spot? One. ONE. It was UCF in 2019 as a member of the four-bid American Athletic Conference, which was a borderline power conference at the time anyway.
Let’s dig deeper.
There have been 2,520 games played in the tournament proper — the field of 64 and beyond — since 1985. Do you want to know how many D-I schools added since ’85 have won a first round game or later? In 2,520 games?
The answer is 19. Nineteen out of 2,520.
That’s well under 1% — 0.754%, in fact. Laughably low. When you factor in ever play-in/First Four game (and these are against fellow low-majors, of course) the win total isn’t even double. Those schools are 36-168 overall, a paltry winning percentage of just .176.
Only one school added to D-I in the last 40 years (Stephen F. Austin) has won games in multiple tournaments. Only two teams (Florida Gulf Coast and Florida Atlantic) have reached at least the Sweet 16, both of them Cinderella stories in their own rights — adding to the appeal of the tournament in process, because the rarity of these stories make them all the more special.
These schools haven’t affected high-major “access” one bit. They’re all chasing for the same number of automatic bids that they were in 1985, with the overwhelming majority of these schools seeded between Nos. 14-16.
The math is stark, dark and obvious: the teams that have been added over the past four-plus decades into D-I have not brought about any tangible additional challenges to qualifying for the field. They’ve simply been added to the same pool of mid- and low-majors that are all fighting for auto bids well over 95% of the time.
High-majors taking more bids than ever
It would also be instructive for the people in charge of deciding whether or not to expand the NCAA Tournament to see the reality of what the tournament’s bid process has become in recent history. Let’s look at a 10-tourney sample size, as that’s enough to view the broader contours of the event as conference realignment has materialized even more opportunities for the biggest leagues.
Over the past 10 NCAA Tournaments, there have been 362 at-large bids (along with 318 automatic invitees). Here is the list of every league to receive an at-large bid since 2015.
Of the 362 at-large bids, 304 of them went to schools in a power conference. That’s 83%. So: Comfortably more than 4 out of every 5 at-large invitations went to college basketball’s upper class in the past decade. (The Big Ten’s had 63 at-large bids over the past 10 tournaments, ranking No. 1, while the SEC is at 60 after its record-shattering 13 at-large/14overall bids last season nudged it two spots past the Big 12.)
The only conferences outside the high-majors to earn at least three at-larges in the past 10 NCAA tourneys are the Mountain West the past four years and the American in 2015-16, which was effectively a power-conference in its initial stages anyway. Keep in mind: The Mountain West as we know it will die off in less than a year’s time, with most of its best programs defecting to a transmogrified Pac-12 in 2026.
Access for the power conferences has not been an issue, and the trend lines only continue to work in their favor as those leagues now occupy a higher percentage of teams than ever before. This was emphatically proven last season by the SEC and Big Ten, which sent a combined 22 of their 34 teams (65%) to last season’s tournament. The opportunities are aplenty and anyone trying to sell a different story is lying for the sake of greed.
Presidents, commissioners and athletic directors at the highest levels of college athletics conspired to create 16- and 18-team megaconferences; they’ll now reap the benefits of those decisions by eating up the most bids even with a 68-team field. There is no conference or conspiracy of schools capable of collectively culling away those opportunities moving forward. The deck has never been more stacked in the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC’s favor.
And if you think expanding the field would provide significantly more opportunities for mid-majors, never forget which people have been at the forefront of trying to change this tournament. It’s not the commissioners of the Missouri Valley, SoCon, MAC and the Horizon League.
Going to 76 would dull the ramp-up to Selection Sunday
One last point that’s worth extra examination, especially in the thick of summer, many months removed from the din of March, when the realities of college basketball’s regular season are most poignantly felt by fans, media, players, coaches and administrators alike.
Over the past 40 years, college basketball has managed to build out a tournament for its entire sport that takes places over the course of five weeks. This point has been made before but it’s worth highlighting one more time on the precipice of such an important decision.
The very nature of conference tournaments allows every team access to the Big Dance by way of an automatic bid. When conference tournaments begin, everyone is playing to get into the NCAA field. We don’t have anything else like this in American sports and it feels like this arrangement is taken for granted. It’s what made NC State’s 2024 run that much more memorable and unique. There’s an idyllic balance with the schedule in that teams that lack impressive résumés feel the push and threat of the bubble in the final couple weeks of the regular season, then have that urgency transfer over to the win-or-else element of the league tourneys.
Gary Parrish and I polled more than 100 coaches last summer about the size of the NCAA Tournament they’d prefer: 68, 72 or 76? To my surprise, staying at 68 was the second-most popular choice, receiving 35% of the vote. More than one-third of the vote. While plenty of coaches have voiced support, there is no shortage of others who back keeping it as is. Nebraska’s Fred Hoiberg said as much just a couple of weeks ago, while UConn’s Dan Hurley bluntly spoke out against changing the tournament when asked about it amid UConn’s 2024 title run.
“I don’t think expanding it is a good idea,” Hurley said, adding he thought it would be “devaluing the regular season.”
What happens if you go to 76? An underwhelming 19-11 team that is dancing on a razor’s edge in 68-team format is easily in the field in a 76-team tournament, which renders the final few teams in an expanded field even less worthy and worth paying attention to.
With a 76-team field, we will have power-conference teams two games above .500 regularly pushing to make the tournament. It won’t be compelling. There have been plenty of years in the past when the selection committee didn’t come close to considering a 76th school for a 68-team field, because in most years college basketball doesn’t produce 72, 74 or 76 teams worthy enough to make the Big Dance.
These are teams that will stagger into the tournament, and in the process, pervert the bracket’s shape and format all the more. For the benefit of what? A few extra games for people to gamble on? These teams will not be good enough to advance far in the field, I promise you. When you tease out the math you will find there actually is a stark difference between the at-large candidates populating the cutline of a 68-team field vs. ones at 76.
No matter which way the committee votes later this week, it’s a historic inflection point for the NCAA and college athletics. Few things in American sports are as anticipated, celebrated and beloved as the NCAA Tournament. It grew into something so special because it was treated as something so special, with caretakers ensuring its improvement and popularity over the past 40-plus years. There’s a huge lesson to be learned in there. We’ll soon find out if the selection committee chooses to be guided by it.
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