March Maddening

The calendar’s best sporting event is upon us, which seems a good time to point out that we should enjoy it while it lasts in its present form because the Big Hats appear to be considering ways to alter the experience and to further enrich the few. 

We speak, of course, of the NCAA basketball tournament. The NCAAs are three weeks of the best that college basketball offers, with intriguing matchups and compelling performances and buzzer-beaters, with just enough upsets and unlikely teams to mask how tilted the overall field is toward the privileged. I’ve whipped that dead nag previously, so I’ll go light in this installment. 

Going forward, the changes being contemplated are in the name of progress, evolution, and governance. Squint and those components might read like “money.” The tournament’s current format has been in place since 1985, when the field expanded to 64 teams. A 65th team and play-in game were added in 2001. Three more teams and the “First Four” concept in 2011 gave us the present 68-team field – 32 conference champions, 36 at-large invitations. 

Discussion about expanding the tournament to 96 teams has been around for more than a decade, a truly terrible idea that I’m convinced will come eventually. It embodies the questionable notion that “if some is good, more is better.” An expanded field would provide at least an extra week of programming and content, which means larger payouts from TV networks. 

The primary reason I think an expanded field is coming has more to do with football than basketball. Football-fueled expansion and realignment has created 16- and 18-team mega-conferences, with no telling what sort of consolidation might occur in the next several years. Those leagues and schools are going to expect (read: demand) the same NCAA Tournament participation percentages in the new landscape. In other words, four or five or six teams from a historic 10- or 12-team league will become seven or eight or nine teams from oversized collections. 

For reference, in the past decade more than 81 percent of at-large bids to the NCAA field have gone to the Power Six conferences (ACC, SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, Big East, and the soon-to-be late, lamented Pac-12). Add the recent ascendant and multi-bid Mountain West Conference, and the remaining 25 leagues might be fighting for scraps. 

In addition, what might NCAA governance look like in the future? Will there even be an NCAA? The power football conferences, bolstered by gajillions in TV money, are doing their own thing. What passed for NCAA leadership has been all but neutered as the organization flails about trying to get a handle on athlete empowerment. Who and what might administer the basketball tournament? 

ESPN snoop Pete Thamel recently posted a piece that said talks are ongoing about a possible 80-team hoops tournament. Plenty of people are quoted in the piece calling the NCAA Tournament a “treasure” and hoping to preserve it in something resembling its present form, that the model shouldn’t simply be blown up and re-created simply because a new power structure is in place. Yet SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, a smart fellow who can step into a leadership vacuum when he sees it, might have given away the goal within the penthouse boardroom: “Nothing remains static. I think we have to think about the dynamics around Division I and the tournament.” He pointed out UCLA’s recent run from First Four to Final Four and Syracuse’s run to the Sweet 16 from a play-in appearance and said, “That just tells you that the bandwidth inside the top 50 is highly competitive. We are giving away highly competitive opportunities for automatic qualifiers (from lower-rated leagues), and I think that pressure is going to rise as we have more competitive basketball leagues at the top end because of expansion.” 

There you have it. The NCAA Tournament not as (relatively) inclusive reward for a season’s accomplishment, but an additional exposure for the membership’s elite brands. Kinda makes you wish for something more pure and less mercenary, like an Apple stock buyback or a Silicon Valley IPO.