NCAA Basketball Tournament Expansion

For the last couple of weeks, there has been a lot of talk of expanding the current NCAA basketball tournament field from 65 teams to 96 teams. This would give the top 32 teams in the tournament a bye for the first game. The NCAA is supposedly giving serious consideration to this concept. I'm completely against this and I'll tell you why later in this post. There are some benefits to this expansion though, so we'll start there.

The Argument for Expansion

- Money. There. I said it. No one wants to admit it, but almost everything the NCAA does is related to the amount of money they could possibly make. A extra round of games could make them even more money in advertising as it would be two more full days of games.

- No team could complain about missing the tournament. If you don't make the top 96 teams in the country, you really don't deserve to be playing for the national championship.

- Finally, it could open the field to include not only the conference tournament winner from the smaller conferences, but it could also include the regular season champion. Imagine you play for Siena College, a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. Now, imagine you go undefeated in your conference regular season. You're 18-0 at the end of the regular season play in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference. Because you played a tougher non-conference schedule, you're 22-4 on the season. Why should your chance at the NCAA tournament come down to how you play over 3 days at the end of the season in your conference tournament? You were by far the best team in your conference during the regular season. If you lose in the championship game of your conference tournament to a team that just shot the lights out for 3 days, do you really not deserve to go to the NCAA tournament? As it stands right now, in that scenario, Siena would not make the NCAA tournament because their conference is one that will only get one team in the tournament and it's tied to their conference tournament championship. Under the proposed 96 team field, you could include both the regular season champion and the tournament champion from the smaller conferences (knowing full well that those two are often the same team for many of the conferences).

The Argument Against Expansion

- Scheduling conflict. There is nothing better than the first weekend of the NCAA tournament. There are games on TV from noon to midnight Thursday-Sunday of opening weekend. It's the one time of the year that I wish I had a television in the bathroom as I just don't want to miss a single minute of it. Adding another round of games would likely add two more days to the tournament. Do you start the tournament on Tuesday and have 6 straight days of games? Do you start the first weekend on a Saturday and Sunday and push the rest of the tournament back a week? It's a logistical change that I'm not really looking forward to in the long run.

- A watered down product. This is my biggest complaint about expansion. Every year we have 5 or so teams that complain that they didn't make the tournament. While they might have a complaint, what are the chances that they'd actually win the tournament (or even win their first and second games of the tournament)?? The lowest seed to ever win the NCAA tournament was Villanova in 1985 as an 8 seed. What that says is, the winner of every NCAA tournament as come from the top 32 teams in the tournament. The lowest seed to ever make the Final Four was George Mason as an 11 seed. There is no need to expand the tournament. If you're not a top 30 team, the odds tell you you're not going to win anyways. Why not go to the NIT where you have a chance to compete for a title.

So, all in all, my thought is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.