The expansion of the men’s and women’s basketball NCAA Tournament to 76 teams will give more players opportunities, get more money into one-bid athletic departments and won’t change the days of the week of either tournament.
The last 12 at-large teams will be playing on Tuesday and Wednesday at two different sites in the men’s tournament — Dayton and another location to be determined. The six games will be part of a triple header at each site on each day. There will be eight 16 seeds at each site, with four advancing to play No. 1 seeds in the 64-team first round. There will be four No. 15 seeds that will do the same, as two No. 15 seeds advance to join two other No. 15 seeds in the round of 64.
The women will do the same thing on Wednesday and Thursday on campus sites and feed into their 64-team field, which begins on Friday.
“Tuesday and Wednesday are going to be more exciting,” outgoing men’s selection committee chair Keith Gill told me during an NCAA expansion breakdown video chat. “It’s going to be more games and more exciting. It’s going to give some teams that haven’t won games in the NCAA Tournament a chance to do so.
“We’re obviously going to have some really good matchups with the at-large teams that are playing each other in the opening round,” said Gill, who is the Sun Belt Conference commissioner. “It’s going to be a lot of great basketball. It’s going to be really, really exciting. We can’t wait for next year.”
Amanda Braun, the outgoing women’s committee chair, said on the same NCAA video breakdown that it’s going to add more teams at those host sites to create even more excitement on campus.
“(The winners of the 16-seed and some 15-seed games) will get a chance to play an extra game, and the probability of winning in that opening round is better for those teams,” said Braun, who is the athletic director at Milwaukee.
A single unit — a win in the NCAA Tournament — is worth just a shade under $2 million and is paid out over a six-year period to each conference. This begins the season after it is earned. Each conference can determine how they share the money with its member schools. The women’s tournament just started paying out units for wins, but theirs is spread over a three-year period, not six.
Critics of expansion will complain about potential mediocre records making the field and/or the addition of more middling power teams at the expense of low- and mid-major schools.
That’s to be determined.
What is true is that the bracket won’t look too different. I’ve done it. You can just have the two same seeded teams playing in an opening-round on the same line on a bracket, just like it has been in years past on the 16-seed line (or the first four at-large team lines opposite their first-round opponent).
The dates of the NCAA Tournament will not change. Conference tournaments aren’t being affected. And to say the regular season is devalued is pure hyperbole. Check the rise in ratings. Schools are still committed on the men’s and women’s side to playing high-profile nonconference games at neutral sites, as well as home-and-home series. And the meaning of every game still matters. Adding eight more teams from 68 to 76, essentially increasing the at-large pool from 36 (down from 37 with the addition of an automatic bid to the new Pac-12) to 44 isn’t going to dramatically change a thing.
“The regular season is as healthy as ever, and this is only going to create more excitement in the regular season, because there’s actually going to be more teams that are alive for the NCAA Tournament at the end,” Gill said. “And so that’s just going to make conference tournaments more exciting. That’s going to make that kind of end of the regular season more exciting as well. So I actually think this is going to be good for the regular season. I think it’s going to be good for the postseason and and I’m just really excited about the opportunity for for those additional schools that are going to have a chance to play in the NCAA Tournament.”
Drama will still dictate the success of the tournament.
“We’re expanding the excitement,” said Braun. “We’re bringing March Madness further into the field of member institutions, and that’s exciting to me. Change is hard for some folks. This really isn’t too much of a change and it’s a change in a really, really positive direction for fans, student athletes and member institutions.”
The goalposts of the bubble are going to just slide a bit. There will still be interest in the last four teams that don’t make the field. But the chase to avoid the opening round will be a source of constant discussion once we get to February.
“There’s nothing more exciting in sports than a Game 7, and in March Madness right now there are 67 Game 7s,” said Gill. “And it will be 75 Game 7s when it’s expanded. And so every game is win or go home, the stakes are as high as they can be. And you’ve got to win hard games, very, very difficult games away from home in a win-or-go-home environment. And it doesn’t get better than that.”
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