Five significant reasons why the NCAA should pass on expanding the Big Dance and stick with 68 teams

The NCAA men’s basketball committee — a group of 12 Division I athletic directors and commissioners, the same people who determine the bracket for each season’s NCAA Tournament — are meeting this week in Park City, Utah, along with select NCAA staff to address a variety of items pertaining to March Madness.

The biggest topic on the agenda is also the most polarizing: potential tournament expansion.

While there is no guarantee a decision on expansion will be made this week, it will be the most consequential talking point. This plot will advance again, as it did a few weeks ago. The selection committee’s annual summer summit comes 19 days removed from NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt flying to Florida to speak at a different convocation — the Conference Commissioners Association’s meetings — to brief college sports’ heads of state on where things stands with potential expansion. We now know the NCAA is considering three options:

Keep the field at 68 teamsIncrease the bracket to 72Inflate to 76

“There certainly was conversation about expansion but it was a clear that no expansion on the table, too,” said one source who heard Gavitt speak in June. “It’s not like this was presented as a guaranteed thing.”

If you’ve forgotten why tournament expansion is even a topic — other than typical sports greed — we reached this point due to the existence of the NCAA Division I Transformation Committee, a venture created in 2021 by former NCAA president Mark Emmert in the wake of the NCAA losing in the NCAA v. Alston case in the Supreme Court 9-0. In 2022, the committee recommended every D-I sport with at least 200 teams explore whether to expand its championship tournament event, and if so, to put a cap on expansion at 25% of a sport’s population. For men’s college basketball, that would have meant a maximum of 90 teams. But 90 was never on the table, and we now know nothing…

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Author : Matt Norlander

Publish date : 2024-07-08 23:43:10

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