FanPost

Expanded NCAA Tournament?

This morning, Joe Lunardi posted an article arguing that it's time to expand the NCAA Tournament from 68 teams to 72 teams (article here). One of his main arguments was that teams like Monmouth and Illinois State can have a great regular season, but not make the tournament because of "a few bad bounces in a conference tournament." That got me thinking about expansion and how that might look. One way of addressing the problem Lunardi identifies would be to give the auto-bid to the regular season champ. Now, conferences will never go for that because it would devalue the conference tournament too much. Another option that I propose here would be to give between 1 and 2 auto bids to each conference: 1 auto bid for the regular season champ, and a second if the tournament champ happens to be different from the regular season champ. That means that there could be as few as 32 auto-bids, or as many as 64. In many conferences, the regular season and conference tournament winners will be the same, in which case, that second auto-bid gets transformed into an at-large bid.

There are some obvious issues with this system. First, it effectively takes bids away from strong, but not conference-winning, major conference teams in favor of a potential second mid- or low-major team. Another issue is it disincentivizes regular season champs from trying hard during the conference tournament. The second issue is easier to deal with: major conference teams that have won the regular season title are already essentially locks for the tournament, and are not playing in the conference tournaments because they want the auto-bid; instead, they want better seeding. The first problem is a little stickier, because who the hell wants Syracuse (or any other major conference school) bumped in favor of a second Sunbelt team? The solution then has to be expansion to ensure that an adequate number of major conference teams get in. There are, by my count, 23 conference that are traditionally one-bid leagues (all leagues except: ACC, Big East, Big 12, WCC, Pac-12, AAC, A-10, Big 10, and SEC, since we assume that the regular season champ is a lock, even if they lose the conference tournament anyway). Even if we assume half of them get 2 bids now, we only need to make up for about 12 lost bids.

So, we expand the tournament from 68 to 80; that means the traditional 64-team tournament, plus 16 additional teams, 4 in each region, who can be in play-in games. This solution does a few things. It adds value to the regular season for mid- and low-major teams, it maintains the value of a conference tournament, it prevents bid-stealing by low-major teams of good-but-not-great major conference teams, it evens out play-in games across regions, and it doesn't add an entire round of games like the 96-team expansion would.

Thoughts? Edits? Grievances? Air 'em out!