As we get closer to the excitement of March Madness, numerous stories have emerged indicating that the NCAA is strongly considering expanding the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, which currently includes 65 teams in a single-elimination format, to a field of 96 teams. Such an expansion would have many downsides and only a single benefit: more money for the NCAA and its member schools. In light of this, it is obvious that expansion would be bad for competition and for college basketball fans everywhere.
To start, let’s look at the motivation for expansion. There are two college sports that are major revenue earners: football and men’s basketball. However, the conferences and the individual schools control most of the revenue in football. The schools take all ticket receipts and merchandising revenue, and the conferences control the (highly lucrative) media contracts. For example, the Southeastern Conference recently signed a 15-year deal with ESPN, worth around $2 billion, to televise SEC football. Out of this money, the NCAA only gets a small cut.
By contrast, the NCAA controls the basketball tournament and thus receives its media revenue. Given the popularity of March Madness, it is no surprise that this deal is the NCAA’s single largest source of money. By one estimate from the Sports Business Journal, more than 90 percent of the NCAA’s annual revenue comes from this one deal.
Numerous college basketball coaches have also come out in support of expansion. Obviously, a bigger field would give more schools a chance to get in the tournament and thus to get a slice of the money it generates. Given the tournament’s wild unpredictability, it would also give more teams a chance to go deep into the tournament, even if they had a sub-par regular season.
However, the downsides to expansion would be significant for fans and certainly outweigh the proposed financial benefits for the NCAA. To start, an expanded tournament would render the regular season even more meaningless than it already is. When mediocre teams can make the 96-team field and have the same chance at a title as the top-ranked teams in the nation, what’s the point of playing to win in the regular season? It could come to the point where the only people who care about the regular season are fans of .500 teams that end up on the bubble going into Selection Sunday.
Expansion would also be to the detriment of the so-called “mid-majors,” whose tendency to generate big upsets of established programs has been a key feature of recent tournaments. The majority of the extra at-large bids would probably go to schools from the major BCS conferences. Even the atrocious Pac-10 would probably get three or four bids in such a system.
Perhaps even more importantly, the 32 games of the first round would essentially be play-in games to take on the 32 highest seeds, which would receive a bye. The seeding would also favor schools from the bigger conferences, as mid-majors have historically received lower seeds even with equivalent or better records (since major-conference competition is seen as tougher). Thus, smaller schools would knock each other out of the tournament in the play-in games and there would be fewer in the main tournament, even if they nominally received more bids than before.
Tournament expansion would also destroy one of the most hallowed parts of the tournament: the bracket. The bracket is already quite large, so expanding it further would just add chaos and confusion for the average fan. It would also make the ritual of filling out the bracket more difficult, as an expanded bracket wouldn’t fit on the average piece of paper.
The tournament’s new format, with two rounds of 64, would also destroy the bracket’s simplicity. It would be asymmetrical and daunting to fill out, diminishing its appeal. The bracket has been arguably the most important feature of the tournament–fans that never watch college basketball during the season even fill them out and follow their picks through the ups and downs of March.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, a bigger tournament would be detrimental to student-athletes. The tournament already spans three weeks and causes athletes to miss a lot of class time. In its pursuit of profits, the NCAA has conveniently ignored the academic ramifications of expansion. This lack of recognition becomes even more ridiculous when you consider the fact that opponents of a football playoff (many of whom are inside the NCAA) cite athletes missing class as an argument against instituting a playoff.
The NCAA risks falling into the same trap as the football conferences–pursuing profit even if it detrimentally affects the sport. I can only hope that it comes to its senses and maintains some semblance of athletic purity.