Tim Benz: Tournament expansion is a bad idea — but if the NCAA can't resist, here's how to do it
Thursday and Friday mark what many feel to be two of the best days of the sports year: the first two days of the NCAA College Basketball Tournament.
Perfectly timed on the sports calendar. Perfectly formatted with its fan-friendly three-week-long bracket system. Perfectly packaged with its survive-and-advance drama, and David vs. Goliath storylines.
It’s wonderful just the way it is.
So let’s mess it up by making it bigger, longer and more complicated.
That seems to be the desire of some within college athletics who are calling for the men’s and women’s tournaments to expand beyond their current field of 68 teams. On Jan. 3 of this year, the NCAA’s Division I Transformation Committee issued a 39-page report. The goal of that report was to advance “opportunities to modernize college sports.”
Perhaps the most significant recommendation was the proposed expansion of postseason tournaments to “accommodate access for 25% of active Division I members in good standing in team sports sponsored by more than 200 schools.”
Based on schools moving up and down divisions year to year, we’re looking at about 355-365 men’s programs and 350-355 women’s programs per season. Including 25% of those institutions would mean roughly 90 invitations for each tournament.
At “Breakfast With Benz,” I recently interviewed a number of coaches from the Atlantic 10 about how they felt expansion would play out from a mid-major point of view. The Associated Press recently published a piece that interviewed a number of conference commissioners about the impact of the idea.
Tournament expansion obviously makes sense for those within the game. More bids to the tournament mean more opportunities for players on the sport’s biggest stage. It means more revenue from more tournament games on television. It means more chances for coaches, athletic directors and conference commissioners to get their teams into the “Big Dance.”
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By extension, that could mean more job security, alumni support and money through bonuses for them and for their institutions.
Yet from a fan-viewing sense, more teams in the tournament could mean diluting the level of accomplishment, importance of each game, and quality of play with more mediocre teams entering the field. Plus, the potential of adding a fourth week — or even a seventh round — may prove cumbersome to scheduling and simply too much to maintain the attention of the viewing public.
Also, anything that messes up the beautiful simplicity of the bracket system which sucks people into their current three-week investment of tournament obsession could mess up the whole appeal.
At this point, though, based on how those within the NCAA are talking, it feels like the economic forces are already chugging down the tracks and tournament expansion is inevitable. So if the powers that be are going to expand the tournament eventually, let’s focus on the best possible way to do it, instead of screaming at clouds to make them stop.
In a recent “Breakfast With Benz” podcast, college basketball writer Mike DeCourcy (Sporting News, Fox, Big Ten Network) backed my stance that the tournament is fine the way it is. But if expansion takes place, he wants to stop short of the suggestion of going to 90 teams by bumping it from 68 to 72.
Basically, allow for four more First Four teams, making it a First Eight.
Ostensibly that would create a second Dayton Regional. Play all four Dayton games on Tuesday starting at noon like they do in other first-round regions. Play four more games in … pick a city … Omaha on Wednesday.
The committee would just leave all the 16 lines open instead of just two and leave all the 11 lines open instead of just two.
If the NCAA would compromise to that baby step of growth, that’d be fine, and it wouldn’t totally mess up the bracket system. But with the run of success some of the 11-seeds have had after surviving Dayton in recent years, that could happen.
However, it feels like 90-ish is the NCAA’s preferred goal. And if the NCAA does go to 90, they might as well go to 96 to make the math work more easily. La Salle coach Fran Dunphy pitched an expanded bracket idea to A-10 coaches last spring at the league meetings.
“You get 96 teams in there,” Dunphy said. “A lot of people will say, if you expand the field then you’ve got to elongate the tournament. In my mind, you don’t. You could have 64 teams at the beginning of the week play to get it to 32. And then you have 32 teams with a bye.”
That could work. It’d make travel quite difficult for all the teams (and their fanbases) to essentially do what just four schools have to do going in and out of Dayton. But it could be done. I’d also be interested if the unofficial national holidays that are the first Thursday and Friday of March Madness’ opening weekend would have the same cache for a “qualifying round” vibe on a Tuesday and Wednesday coming right off of championship weekend. But I suppose it could replicate the same feel.
Personally, I’d tweak Dunphy’s 96-team plan a little bit.
• Start the regular season a week earlier so that the conference tournaments conclude the first weekend in March instead of the second weekend in March.
• Forget a final bracket of 68. We are going back to a bracket of 64. There are 32 D-1 basketball conferences. So the math lines up perfectly. I suggest all 32 conference tournament champions get automatic entry into the final field of 64.
• The other 32 slots will be filled by at-large berths from the remaining top 64 teams in the country. Just rank them 1 through 64 via one agreed upon computer metric, or have the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee rank the teams 1 to 64.
For instance, Memphis won the AAC tournament this year. Top-ranked Houston did not. Tough luck for Houston. Memphis is automatically in the tournament. Houston has to win a game in this new qualifying round to make the field of 64.
• On what had previously been Selection Sunday, release the remaining 1 through 64 rankings instead. Houston plays whoever No. 64 is. Big 12 runner up Kansas is second. The Jayhawks play whoever No. 63 is. Pac 12 runner up UCLA would probably be third. They get team No. 62 and so forth.
Along with the 32 conference champions, there is your 96-team field.
• Go with eight regions, four games apiece on the second Friday and Saturday of March just like we normally do to begin the first two days of March Madness. That’ll produce 32 winners who will get at-large berths.
• On that Sunday, now the committee can seed a 64-team field as it sees fit from all 32 conference champions and the 32 at large teams. If Houston and Kansas are still alive and worthy of being No. 1 seeds, so be it. If team No. 62 upsets UCLA, maybe that team is an 11-seed or a 10.
This way you keep the drama of a Selection Sunday as is. The all-inclusive fun of the bracket system isn’t compromised at all by having a qualifying round. And the romance of the small conference Cinderella schools potentially knocking off top seeds is still intact.
Is this plan perfect? Is Dunphy’s? No. They aren’t.
That’s because the NCAA Tournament itself is perfect right now, and, by definition, if you mess with perfection, you are going to make it imperfect. But that’s the best idea that I can come up with if the NCAA decides that more is better.
In this case, it isn’t. But they’ll probably do it anyway. So at least I hope they do it in an intelligent fashion.
I’m probably asking too much.
On Thursday’s podcast page, Tim Benz interviews Mike DeCourcy about the NCAA Tournament bracket, and previews Pitt-Iowa State with Travis Hines of the Des Moines Register.
Tim Benz is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Tim at tbenz@triblive.com or via X. All tweets could be reposted. All emails are subject to publication unless specified otherwise.
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