The NCAA Tournament wants to expand without losing its soul. It will be a delicate needle to thread

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Kevin Keatts and North Carolina State reached the NCAA Tournament the old-fashioned way.

The way that existed before the bubble. Before bracketology. Before NET rankings, KenPom, the transfer portal, name, image and likeness and all the rest. Before the tournament field grew (and grew some more), when the only way to punch your ticket into March Madness was by winning your conference tournament.

N.C. State earned the Atlantic Coast Conference’s automatic bid by ripping off five victories in five days to capture the conference tournament title. The 11th-seeded Wolfpack pushed their postseason winning streak to seven and are now in the Sweet 16 for the first time in nearly a decade.

It’s been a thrilling if exhausting ride, the kind of run that saves jobs. It has also done little to alter Keatts’ view about whether the tournament should expand beyond its current 68-team format:

In an era where more than half the 133 Division I football programs qualify for a bowl game (while acknoledging this is not the purview of the NCAA), forcing 80% of the 350-plus Division I basketball schools to watch March Madness from their dorms seems outdated and unnecessarily punitive.

“We talk about the student-athlete experience, and the only thing that really, in my opinion, that has not changed is expanding the tournament,” Keatts said. “And I don’t have a number. I don’t know what that should be. But I do think we should give more schools opportunities to be able to get in the tournament.”

Keatts is hardly alone. The chorus for expansion is growing ever louder.

MORE TEAMS, MORE PROBLEMS?

The NCAA committee has discussed all of this at length in the wake of the organization’s transformation committee suggesting that NCAA-sanctioned championships in larger sports be open to a quarter of the teams participating in it.

In Division I men’s basketball, that breaks down to around an 88-team field, which would make for an unwieldy option to the (nearly) perfect 68-school bracket that’s been an…

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/ncaa-tournament-wants-expand-without-201159058.html

Author : Associated Press

Publish date : 2024-03-25 20:11:59

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