On March 9, late in the afternoon on the opening day of the Big East Tournament, Xavier and Butler contested a basketball game between the league’s No. 8 and No. 9 seeds. Xavier entered having lost seven of its previous nine. Butler had dropped 70 percent of its conference games. And still this game carried enormous consequence and delivered extraordinary drama, because everyone inside Madison Square Garden, and the considerable television audience watching on FS1, knew what was on the line.
Xavier was playing for a bid.
Such a sentence is embedded in the language of the sport now. The NCAA staff has spent nearly the past two decades working to educate the public on the mechanics of the March Madness selection process, and media pioneers such as ESPN’s Joe Lunardi, USA Today’s Steve Wieberg and Jerry Palm of CBS Sports helped the audience to begin to see inside. The race for the final few tournament bids is an essential part of what has made March college basketball’s own month.
MORE: North Carolina opens year as AP's No. 1 team
If the commissioners of several powerful conferences have their way, such a game would be meaningless. There would be no tension in anticipation of that game. There would be none inside it. Xavier blows a 6-point lead in the final 52 seconds of regulation? They miss all five free throws in that stretch? Lose in overtime? Eh, who cares? The Musketeers are 18-13, with some decent power ranking numbers.
The committee has to put someone in the 72-team field.
Or would it be 80? Or – dear God, not this again -- 96?
Source: While the Division 1 Transformation Committee has discussed expanding the NCAA Tournament in all sports, there's a strong sentiment that expanding the Men's Basketball NCAA Tournament is different because of its uniqueness.
— Jon Rothstein (@JonRothstein) October 20, 2022
The committee meets later this month. https://t.co/1a0qXOziSO
The people in charge of college athletics are all exceedingly bright. They have proven their ingenuity as athletic directors, in professional sports front offices, as business executives. How are they missing so badly on this? How do they not see that the “extra” games that already exist in the NCAA Tournament’s First Four are far from appointment viewing for even ardent college basketball fans? How do they not comprehend the damage that will be done through even a modest expansion to the excitement generated in their own regular seasons and conference tournaments?
I’ve come to believe they get all this, but also they recognize NCAA president Mark Emmert’s need for some positive publicity and fiscal certainty in 2016, which led to an extension of the deal signed six years earlier with CBS and Turner, has left the NCAA Tournament significantly undervalued in today’s market. The NCAA will get roughly $1 billion a year starting in 2025, when the extension begins and runs through 2032. That’s a lot of money. Perhaps there could be more, though.
Could the contract be opened up should the field expand? It is not clear whether such a thing is possible, but it seems the only rational explanation for this expansionist zeal.
* The public has no apparent hunger for an NCAA Tournament that is further expanded. That is evident in the numbers from last spring’s First Four games. They drew, on average, about 1.7 million viewers. That’s pretty good for a standard college basketball game, but those numbers were at least a little juiced by having attractions Notre Dame and Indiana involved (with ND playing a double-overtime thriller). Stretching that to another two opening-round games is likely to draw down that number because their broadcast windows could not be in prime time.
* There is no need for major conferences to panic over bid access, even as they expand their membership. In the past five seasons, only one of the Power 5 conferences averaged fewer than six NCAA bids per season; that was the Pac-12, at 3.6 bids per year. The Big Ten and ACC averaged 7.4 each, the Big 12 and SEC got 6.4 each and the Big East was at 5.4. Those six leagues combined consumed 36.6 bids per season, or 54 percent of the field. Remember, the 16-team Big East once received 11 bids. At 14 members, the Big Ten has placed nine in the field each of the past two seasons, and with 15 members the ACC did it in both 2017 and 2018. How did these leagues pull that off? They played terrific basketball in the regular season.
* This can’t be about the money generated by the current bid structure. Each tournament “unit” is worth around $2 million total. Given that the majority of First Four teams don’t last long, one such check – divided 12 or 14 or 16 ways – is not going to change the fortunes of any big-time league.
* Has everyone forgotten how important the bracket is to the event's popularity?
* The teams being excluded from the 68-team field don’t belong.
For the past three years, I have served as the bracket analyst for Fox Sports. So part of my job during the college basketball season is to dive deeply into what sort of teams fit into the current field. Last season, I was incorrect on one team by Selection Sunday: I had Texas A&M included. I was not alone in this. Of the 211 bracket projections aggregated online by the Bracket Matrix, 200 of them had the Aggies in the field.
MORE: Inside Dane Fife's haunted homecoming at Indiana
Lunardi had them in place of Wyoming. I put them in ahead of Notre Dame, which was the most common decision. I believed the Aggies’ victories in the SEC Tournament over Auburn and Arkansas – and a head-to-head neutral-court win over ND – warranted inclusion. But making a case against them is a layup.
The Aggies were 4-9 against teams in the field and lost three times to teams that were nowhere close. They lost nine out of 10 from late January to late February. My vote says they belonged, only because somebody has to be the 68th team. Their record left it up to the whims of others whose votes actually counted.
This is who would have filled the next four spots if the field were stretched to 72, in addition to the Aggies and Musketeers, according to the Bracket Matrix: SMU, which won three of its five games against NCAA Tournament opposition but lost six times to teams that did not make the field, and Oklahoma, which owned three losses against non-tournament teams and a 4-12 record against the field.
How many times must a team lose to NCAA Tournament opposition to definitively prove it is not NCAA-worthy itself?
And it’s unimaginable how horrid the field would be if it were go beyond 72, let alone how little meaning would be attached to the regular season and major conference tournaments in such a scenario.
No, there’s only one reason for anyone to push the expansion of March Madness field beyond its limits. And it may seem like a good reason at the moment. But there’ll be no way to undo the damage to the sport and its appeal.